Umbraco Codegarden 2021

Codegarden is the biggest international Umbraco conference in the world. Organised by UmbracoHQ (the company behind Umbraco CMS), it is open for developers, web designers, marketing, and business owners to attend.

Due to the current restrictions in place, this year’s Umbraco Codegarden was a virtual conference but was designed to be as interactive as possible, with various FAQ sessions and chat options. The turnout for Codegarden was still fantastic with over 2,350 delegates attending. 

What was covered in Codegarden 2021?

Over two days, I was able to attend over 20 talks on a variety of topics; here are just a few of the of the talks that I found particularly interesting:

• Umbraco 9 the next major version
• Umbraco performance tuning
• Making Search Friendly
• Adding accessibility to the development process
• Getting Started with Unit Testing in Umbraco
• Future of application development with .NET

The main theme that stood out to me from the various talks were focusing on the new features available in Umbraco, the enhanced/updated accessibility features, unit tests and running Umbraco in the cloud.

Some of the motivations behind the updates included:

• Support the new .NET framework
• Better cross-platform support
• Performance improvements
• Avoiding legacy technologies
• Being able to run Umbraco from Microsoft's .NET

The update to Microsoft's latest version of .NET and the web-framework will make ongoing maintenance much easier in the future. Another key change is that static events are no more, they have been replaced by a notifications pattern which makes it possible to handle asynchronous notifications and makes dependency injection easier.

There was a talk focusing on ‘Making Search Friendly’ which provided a great overview on how the Umbraco search (Examine, which is a Lucene-based search and index engine for Umbraco) is used, the common pitfalls that people fall into and how to avoid such issues. Search Extensions and Examine Facets were also briefly covered in this talk and add an extra level to the current out-of-the-box search.

‘Umbraco Performance Tunning’ was also an interesting topic. We are all aware that the load time of a website can impact a user’s initial impression of a site so identifying tools that can help isolate an issue is important. The talk covered the Mini Profiler which is a project included within Umbraco and profiles your code method calls giving you an insight into the code duration and query time for underlying SQL queries. Tips on how best to optimize certain aspects of your code were discussed with several examples and it was interesting to observe other people’s views on such topics.

The ability to add accessibility testing to a deployment of an Umbraco site was another thought-provoking area. There were many additional points covered that could be used to help aid accessibility testing including tools to allow you to run unit tests for accessibility.

Final thoughts

There was so much information to take on board from this Codegarden conference and the future of Umbraco looks very interesting. It will be fascinating to see how this version will be received and used by others and what we can take from this to use in future Umbraco developments.