Reflection

Today I had a meeting with Christian Svensson at Milagro, and Ted Nyberg from Ted & Gustaf. Me, Ted and Peter Nyqvist (also from Milagro) will be speaking at the Umbraco fifth birthday event in Stockholm, but Peter is on peternity leave this week, so I covered his bit.

I'm going to showcase the PDF Studio app i built last year, Peter will talk about using your own XML-formatted data in the Umbraco context and using the built-in XSLT macro engine for presentation, and Ted will cover extension of the Umbraco UI, with custom sections, trees, and properties.

We also decided to do all the talks in Swedish, however, I'll cover my talks in a series of blog posts here, as mentioned earlier, in English.

So far there's about 50 registered attendees, and I'm starting to feel the nerves. There will be PLENTY of rehearsing :)

Ted showed me some code he's currently working on, and it was clear that we work quite differently. His approach is "if possible in code, code it", while I tend to lean towards the XSLT approach, only opening Visual Studio when needed (however, I code my XSLT in Visual Studio as well).

I'm sure that it will be a very interesting afternoon for everyone, and there will be a lot of Umbraco experiense attending. Niels will hit like a Kamikaze, and do a quick presentation as well, but leaving straight afterwards for the oh-so chique Umbraco all-you-can-drink birthday-bash in Copenhagen later in the evening. I've got a kid, so I'm staying in Stockholm.

On the 16th of February, Umbraco turns five, a surprisingly vigorous five-year-old if you ask me, and this will be celebrated at several locations across the globe. If you live in Sweden, and have the possibility to attend, you really should try to get there. You can sign up here. If you don't live in Sweden, there's a possibility that there's an event in your country too, so check out the list of events.

The company hosting the event, Milagro, has asked me to hold a short presentation at the event, and I'm going to talk about and showcase an application I developed for a client of theirs. It's a web based PDF Creation Tool, that uses Umbraco more as an application engine and framework, than in the role of the more traditional Content Management System, that I believe Umbraco is most commonly used as. This case was actually how I introduced Milagro to the magnificent product that Umbraco is, and they have already managed to certify two employees, both level 1 and 2, and by the time of the event, two more, making them the agency with the most certified developers in Sweden.

I'll be covering this application in a series of blog posts here as well, but if you're attending the event you'll get the goods in one go.

I'm very satisfied with the application, although steps has already been taken to improve it extensively, but as this is a work in progress and not nearly finished, I won't cover it in my presentation.

If you have no idea what Umbraco is, this is an opportune moment to find out. I really think you should attend.