Setting up local development environment for Umbraco

Question

I have inherited an Umbraco CMS project, the Umbraco instance and custom user controls exist on our test server as the initial build has been demo-ed to the client already. I now need to take this on, the initial build was done by a freelance dev before my time here and no documentation exists on set up, deployment, etc.

The custom usercontrols were under source control and build ok, after a bit of bug fixing. I have followed the following to try and get an instance of the Umbraco install and custom controls working on my machine for developing against.

http://slickjuanito.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/setting-up-umbraco-development-environment-in-visual-studio-2010/

http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/getting-started-with-umbraco-what-is-next-after-you-install/setting-up-your-project-in-visual-studio

I am pointing the Umbraco web config at the database with the relevant content in and can access the back end of the CMS, however when i go to the Default.aspx i just get a blank page. I have set VS2010 up to throw CLR exceptions and started the solution in debug mode to see if an error is being thrown and nothing.

Can anyone either suggest things to try and get it running properly or point me to some resources tha might help?

Thanks

Chris

Answer 1

If you have IIS Express installed, what I have found easiest is to:

1. Copy the filesystem of the site from the server to a folder in the Inetpub of your local machine.
2. Create a site in IIS and point to those files.
3. In Visual Studio, click File, Open, Website, and then choose the site.

If you have the MVC Framework installed, syntax highlighting will work for razor (.cshtml) scripts.

One step further would be to make a copy of the database and point the connection string to that copy. The copy could be restored to another database server, or if you have SQL Server Express installed, you can run the copy locally as well.