After the announcement of discontinuing Umbraco v5 development during this years Code Garden 2012 conference, the biggest question seemed to be: What will happen with ASP.Net MVC and Umbraco. We held an open space session regarding this question where we asked 2 questions: “Is an MVC implementation in Umbraco important to have for the front end?” and “Is an MVC implementation important to have for the back office?”. There were quite a few people who attended this session and I think 100% of people raised their hands in answer to the first question and only 1 person raised their hands for the second answer.  I think this result was expected since most Umbraco developers simply wish to use MVC in their own development on the front-end and want the Umbraco back office to keep working with all of the great packages already created for it.

There was a considerable amount of knowledge gained in creating v5 and of course we will incorporate much of this knowledge into v4… starting real soon! I decided to create a package for Umbraco v4 which enables a native MVC front end which was demo’d during the Code Garden package competition and is available right now!  It turns out that creating this didn’t take much time at all, in fact I created it during the 2nd day of the conference. The reason this was reasonable easy was because we had all of this already built for v5 so it was a matter of taking this knowledge and code and applying it to v4.

So if you are like many other devs and really want Umbraco to route to a native MVC front end then you can give this package a try, its called umbraMVCo. Please be warned that I have not tested this very much, but also know that its just using the tried and tested v4 api’s to do the routing so I’m assuming it will ‘just work’ … though I’m sure you guys will find some bugs I haven’t yet :) There’s also a readme file on the downloads page which explains how to install it, and what settings/servers that I know it works with.

What’s also really cool is this code completely supports Hijacking Umbraco Routes!

Download/Source

You can download the package and readme files here

https://bitbucket.org/Shandem/umbramvco/downloads

Ensure that you read the readme file, it contains some very important information including installation instructions!

The source can be found here:

https://bitbucket.org/Shandem/umbramvco/src

If you come across issues with this please log issues here: https://bitbucket.org/Shandem/umbramvco/issues . The source isn’t really complicated or anything though so you should be able to identify the reason for an issue if you come across it.

What’s next?

So will MVC be coming to v4… Yes indeed. We will also support routing to either WebForms or MVC and we’ll support this by having a flag on the document type to choose which rendering engine to use. We’ve got a few things to do in v4 regarding how routing works to do this nicely/properly but the end result will be pretty much the same as what this package enables. All of those cool MVC things that you liked in v5 like SurfaceControllers will be coming to v4 as well, we will still support Child Action and Partial View macros. Another cool thing is that we should be able to support Xslt and UserControl macros in MVC as well (though any post backs will definitely not work).

So even though the development of v5 has been discontinued, a ton of the concepts that you liked about it will in fact be ported to v4.