Well, maybe you'd do better, but Jon and I made the most basic of errors. But despite this we had a great day - productive and enjoyable. So I thought I'd share a report on the day that you might find amusing, but also might help you if you decide to do something similar. It's basic as hell - but it's the little things that get ya!

1. Bring the power supply for your laptop (this one's mine - still can't believe I did this!). Thankfully there was another Dell laptop at the office that I could steal for the day. Schoolboy error number one.

2. Ensure that the power works in the room you'll be working in.

3. If there is a codebase in a repository somewhere already, then make sure each team member has logged in and has downloaded the latest codebase in preparation to hit the ground running. I'd logged in and changed my avatar - but hadn't changed my password, so I was locked out. Schoolboy error number two. Also, there is a difference between being able to log in and being able to download the code, depending on the granularity of the security settings of the system you're using.

4. Have plenty of refreshments on hand, and know how everyone takes their tea. A very important one this, and thankfully Jon was on it, plenty of tea flowing all day. (I know, real developers drink coffee, but we're just pretending to be geeks).

5. Ensure your codebase builds and is stable - no last-minute changes! The last thing you want is to be tweaking it while the other members of the team twiddle their thumbs while you fix your mistakes. Bring new code by all means, but don't commit until you're sure it's going to work - at least then you won't stop others from getting on with it. Basic SVN best practices.

6. Make sure you're using the database you think you are, and have the latest version online on your server (if you are running a demo site like we were). Messing about downloading database publishing wizards and the like is just more time wasted.

7. Have all of the tools you're going to need installed and working on your laptop. Make sure you have enough disk space free for the tools you'll need too (schoolboy error number three).

8. Have your usernames/passwords/connection strings/etc somewhere central that everyone can access them. Using a forgotten password link while everyone sits around waiting for the email to arrive is not very productive.

9. Factor in time for excited tweeting.

Timeline

09.30 - 10.00 Fun with power cables and SVN - WASTE.

10.00 - 11.00 Architecture chat.

11.00 - 12.00 Database issues, getting latest database onto the server, installing database publishing wizard and worrying about twindling disk space - WASTE.

12.00 - 13.00 Let the real work begin! Creating Umbraco document types, getting existing code onto server, getting site finally finally working. Started on user controls.

13.00 - 14.00 Excellent slap-up lunch. We deserve it.

14.00 - 16.30 Awesome burst of creation. Site grows and grows. Not much said, lots of tea drank.

16:30 User signup live and tested on live site! Can browse to members, their blogs and galleries, etc.

16:30 - 17:30 Testing, more development and wrap-up.

Completed

Member sign up, sign in.

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Summary

So we've created the bare bones of a social networking platform based on Umbraco in a matter of hours. This is a testament to Umbraco's ease of use rather than our programming prowess that's for sure. It shows you how much is possible with Umbraco in a short time - imagine if we'd actually been organised! We have a second day of SocialFront development planned for later in the month and hopefully we'll be releasing the lot before the end of the year. As I said in the Introduction to SocialFront we are hoping to provide the foundation for Umbraco developers to build on, and we're hoping that folk will get involved. Having both worked on a number of large social networking sites, and with Jon's extensive experience with the existing systems out there, and knowing what the Umbraco community is like, we are confident that we are starting the development of a system to rival the best of the paid-for social networking platforms out there. We have plenty of ideas for future development, but first step is to get the code out the door so people can see it and use it and get involved. Watch this space!

The Duct Tape Programmer (may as well get the controversial ones in there first!)

How to Contribute to Open Source (When You're Not Exactly Scott Hanselman)

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

The Humble Programmer

So you might get the impression that we are not hot-shot programmers - and you'd be right. We certainly aren't. But we have a good idea, and we're willing to give it a shot, and we're even willing to let the uber-programmers in the community see our "work". We are all about making a start, a foundation, for the work to continue from. We hope that people will like what we produce and find it interesting and useful enough that they will make use of it and perhaps even contribute to it themselves.

Initially we thought about developing the site in a number of different ways. We got bogged down in the latest and greatest technologies and even talked about IOC for a while. We both wanted to play with and learn to use this trendy new MVC stuff, and maybe we could use LINQ as well just to be cool. We got nowhere. We read a lot, learned a lot, be we developed squat. So the project kind of died a death for a while. Then we thought about what we were doing and realised that what we really needed to do was Keep It Simple. We also didn't really want to reinvent the wheel. And we both had plenty of good experience with Umbraco. I think you can see what happened next.

Anyway to get to the point Jon and I agreed to commit to two full days of coding with Umbraco to see what kind of magic we could come up with in that admittedly short timescale. And last Saturday was day 1.We learnt a lot, made plenty of mistakes, made plenty of progress, and had a lot of fun. (Non-geeks: fun is a relative term). We aren't about to release anything just yet, as we have a second day to do towards the end of this month, with a view to releasing an alpha (pre-alpha?) version by Christmas. Right Jon? But I thought I'd blog about it and share our experiences with the community over the next few blog posts, as a kind of teaser and lead-up to the release of the package itself. I don't want to big it up too much - but it's going to be AWESOME.

Everyone knows how upgrading a site can lead to problems, and sometimes work like this is just more hassle than it's worth. If this is your attitude, it's pretty simple to turn off the notifications by updating the following entry in your web.config:

<add key="umbracoVersionCheckPeriod" value="7" />

Set the value to zero to turn off the updates - the default value is to check for a new version
every 7 days. It's also worth noting that this popup only appears to administrator-type users of the site.

But in reality there's nothing to be afraid of, the upgrade process is pretty straightforward, at least for a minor upgrade such as the one I've just finished with the Web Garden site. You can find the latest version of Umbraco for download here along with all the documentation you could possibly need to ensure a smooth upgrade process. This includes install guides for a number of server setups, and an upgrade guide which deals with the various upgrade scenarios. Of course you should avoid upgrading your live site directly; upgrade your local or dev version first, do your testing, and then ftp the changes to the live server when you're happy it's all ready to go.

I've also installed Warren Buckley's Twitter4Umbraco package to display my latest tweet on the website. Once again Ashleigh at Ash Creative came up with the design in keeping with the look and feel of the Web Garden site and I think it brightens everything up a little. It's a great little package and very easy to use - a good example of how easy it is to extend Umbraco with packages. For many other excellent Umbraco packages, check out the Umbraco project hub which is filled with the latest code from the community.

Well, actually, you don't. Just export your document type from your local install, and import it on your server, and it will magically overwrite the existing document type! This means that existing nodes that use that document type now have all of your new attributes!

Disclaimer: this has worked a grand total of once for me, so be careful! Also, I have no idea what happens to your data if you change existing attribute types - this worked nicely when I had to add many new attributes. As I said, this is a quick tip! Use at your own risk!

From my point of view, I saw that I had a number of options. I could add three fields to each document type which could have such an image: one for the image, one for the caption header, and one for the caption text. Then I could create two templates - one that had extra fields for the image, caption header and caption text, and another without. Then the content editor could choose which template was required. Or, I could create a macro to be used in the richtext editor - a much more elegant solution. Here's how to do it.

Firstly, I updated the image media type so that content editors could add a caption header and caption text to any image that they wanted to:

Then I created a new xslt macro called Image With Caption. Here is the xslt. Note that it takes one parameter, which is a mediaCurrent parameter type (hence the slightly unusual way of accessing the macro parameter).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [ <!ENTITY nbsp " "> ]>
<xsl:stylesheet 
    version="1.0" 
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
    xmlns:msxml="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"
    xmlns:umbraco.library="urn:umbraco.library" xmlns:Exslt.ExsltCommon="urn:Exslt.ExsltCommon" xmlns:Exslt.ExsltDatesAndTimes="urn:Exslt.ExsltDatesAndTimes" xmlns:Exslt.ExsltMath="urn:Exslt.ExsltMath" xmlns:Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions="urn:Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions" xmlns:Exslt.ExsltStrings="urn:Exslt.ExsltStrings" xmlns:Exslt.ExsltSets="urn:Exslt.ExsltSets" 
    exclude-result-prefixes="msxml umbraco.library Exslt.ExsltCommon Exslt.ExsltDatesAndTimes Exslt.ExsltMath Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions Exslt.ExsltStrings Exslt.ExsltSets ">


<xsl:output method="html" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

<xsl:param name="currentPage"/>
  <xsl:param name="image" select="/macro/image/node"/>

<xsl:template match="/">


  <div class="img img203">
    <img class="left" height="138" width="203">
      <xsl:attribute name="src">
        <xsl:value-of select="$image/data[@alias = 'umbracoFile']"/>
      </xsl:attribute>
      <xsl:attribute name="alt">
        <xsl:value-of select="$image/data[@alias = 'altText']"/>
      </xsl:attribute>
    </img> 
    <p class="caption">
      <span class="highlight">
        <xsl:value-of select="$image/data[@alias = 'captionHeading']"/>
      </span>  <xsl:value-of select="$image/data[@alias = 'captionText']"/>
    </p>
  </div>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

And here is the macro. Note that I have checked the "use in editor" checkbox - this means that you can use the macro in the richtext editor, as you'll see.

I've also set up the macro with a single MediaCurrent parameter, so that the user can specify which image they want to include in the content:

And that's pretty much it for configuring the functionality. For your content manager, they can now use the insert macro button to insert a macro into their content:

When they click this button, they get a list of all macros that you have defined for your site as being available to use in the editor:

Click OK, and then they get to choose the image that they want to display:

Click choose, and select the image required by browsing the Media section of the site. Click on the image they want and then click the OK button. Now themacro should appear in the content in the richtext editor:

How it appears in the richtext editor is not necessarily how it will appear on the site. It depends on the stylesheets on the site and the markup in the xslt as to how it will appear. You'll notice that my xslt file has a lot of custom markup like heights and widths and classes in there to style the output.

So there you have it. A user-friendly way of inserting stylish content straight into your richtext editor without any need for content managers to mess about with html or understand xslt. Yet another great feature of Umbraco!

David

Tim Geyssens has created a very useful package for Umbraco (in fact, he has created several) that lets some of the more important blog-related sites know that you've published new content or updated your existing content in your blog. From the package documentation:

By default, the package is set up to work with the umbracoblog package so that every time you create a new blog post or update an existing one, this package sends out a ping (asynchronously) to a list of sites specified in the config file to notify them immediately of the new or updated post. You can easily configure the package to work with your own document types instead of the umbracoblog package.

The package is called PingXMLRPC, and it is available from the Umbraco package repository. Just go to the developer section of Umbraco, expand the Packages folder and click on the Umbraco package repository link. Choose Website Utilities, and then PingXMLRPC. Here you can download and install the package. You can also link directly to it here: Tim's excellent PingXMLRPC package for Umbraco.

The documentation [pdf] is linked to from here too and it explains how you can customise it for your own purposes. I have set mine up to ping a long list of blog search engines every time a blog entry is published, including technorati.com and blogsearch.google.com, among many others. A great way to increase your online profile without doing very much extra work at all.

David

I checked over everything. I checked all my Plesk permissions. I checked that all of the v4.0.1. files had been updated correctly. I republished the whole site. Repeatedly. I checked the umbracoLog table in the database. And there it was. An xml error:

Xml wasn't saved: System.Xml.XmlException:

Invalid XML document, The document does not have a root element..

at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Save(String filename)

at umbraco.content.SaveContentToDisk(XmlDocument xmlDoc)

And it also turns out that the data/umbraco.config file didn't exist.

Here's what I think happened. When I was testing Live Writer integration, I kept getting errors to do with special characters, specifically where single, straight quotes were being converted to "smart" quotes, and my dashes were becoming other characters that were in fact invalid characters to include in xml. The blog entries were appearing in Umbraco, but Live Writer was crapping out on me.

I deleted the offending files in Umbraco and messed about with the settings in Live Writer. I'm using Windows Live Writer 2009, and there are a couple of options that you need to check:

Go to Tools -> Options... and choose the Editing tab

Uncheck the following options:

- Replace hyphens (--) with dash (-)

- Replace "straight quotes" with "smart quotes"

- Replace other special characters

Save your changes. This will prevent Live Writer from uploading invalid xml characters to your Umbraco site. Because the Umbraco content tree is stored as xml, these characters can break your whole site.

My site was down until I emptied the recycle bin at which point the invalid characters were finally purged from the site, and the data/umbraco.config file could be written to disk correctly (at least, that's my theory at this point!). This is the site structure stored as xml, and if there are invalid characters, then it won't get written correctly to disk.

I hope that this helps you if you're having similar issues, or just configuring Live Writer for client use. Now that these issues have been ironed out, I'll still be using Live Writer to blog with ahead of the built-in rich-text editor - it's just so much easier.

Cheers,

David

First off, a couple of packages that I now use on all Umbraco sites as standard:

1. Douglas Robar's excellent ImageGen package

You can get from the Umbraco package repository (Developer section -> packages in the Umbraco admin). I uploaded the content images for the site to the Media section, and then linked to them using ImageGen instead of a direct link in the html. This means that the images are cached automatically for me. I don't use thumbnails on my site, but for client sites that is often a requirement, and ImageGen is an excellent tool for that - the images look better than squashing them with height and width values in the html, and again you can take advantage of the caching to speed up page load times.

2. PeterD's compression package

This is another staple for all my Umbraco sites. Dead simple to install and configure (the instructions are included when you install the package and they are very easy to follow), this tool compresses all of your javascript and css files. It also merges multiple javascript and css references in the header into a single reference for each, thus improving response times. It's pretty much free compression, there's no reason not to have this tool on every site you build.

And some other improvements that I've been meaning to make for ages now:

The blog package was completely updated to the new blog for Umbraco v4. This is available from the package repository. It checked a number of things on my wishlist, including Gravatars in the blog comments, a blogroll, categories and date filtering and archiving. I did customise the xslt for my own uses a bit but the vast majority of the work was already done.

I also implemented AJAX comments on my site. Once again I turned to PeterD for help with this one (Implementing AJAX comments on your Umbraco site). I actually took his code and messed with it a bit so that I could use it both for blog comments and for the contact form on my site. Using his datatype for blog comments but also using Tim's Umbraco blog package meant I had to make some minor tweaks to get them to play nice together but they seem to work well now.

Syntax highlighting for code in my blog posts is something I've wanted for ages. I used SyntaxHighlighter version 2.0 for this. It provides a number of "brushes" which are basically sets of syntax highlighting tools. I use the Javascript, c# and Sql brushes on the site. It works using javascript along with some very simple css. I add tags like <pre class="brush: c#">code here</pre> around my code and it does the rest using javascript. Smart.

Twitter integration I used Warren Buckley's Twitter package for Umbraco. It displays a number of my latest tweets, or it can be configured to include tweets of those people that I follow, i.e. my whole tweet stream. You'll probably notice that you can't see it on the site at the moment. Well, that's because I'm a really crap designer and I'm going to wait until I get someone to make it look nice for me!

Windows LiveWriter integration. I followed Tim's excellent instructions to configure Windows LiveWriter. They are for an older version of Windows Live Writer than the latest one but they still work. You can download Windows Live Writer from the Microsoft site. This makes it a hell of a lot easier to post code, for example. I find that Tiny MCE does strange things when you try and paste code into the HTML view, and you can often lose your tags. This way is much easier, and it keeps a draft copy locally too.

Google Sitemap. This is just an xslt template which creates a sitemap in the format that Google likes. I then let Google know about it and they can use it to index my site and work out where the new pages are. It also allows you to specify how often the content is updated, and which are the most important pages on your site. Great for search engine optimisation.

Of course the irony is that just as I finally upgrade to v4.0.0, v4.0.1 is released! Sometimes being a cutting edge developer is hard work :) Luckily though the upgrade is straightforward and easy. There is a good blog post on how to upgrade your Umbraco v4.0.0 site to v4.0.1 on the forum by PeterD. Dead simple.

David

The way that I get Umbraco information to my user controls is through the use of the web.config file (see my other post for more details), so I'll assume that you understand that method. It means that there is a central location to change each setting, regardless of how many different user controls use those settings. I think this is a little easier to maintain than passing parameters - what if you are passing a settings node parameter to seven different macros in twelve different templates, and for some reason the settings node id changes? With the web.config solution, you only have to update it in one place.

Anyway, I've updated my methods so that if you've forgotten to set your values in the web.config, or if the setting is there but empty or invalid, then you get a nice big exception thrown telling you exactly what the problem is. Remember that this is only supposed to happen during development/testing phase of your project, and its supposed to explicitly tell you the problem so you can fix it quickly. These exceptions should never be thrown once the site is live. So here are my methods hope you find them interesting/thought provoking/useful. As always I'm interested in the best way to do things so if you disagree with my methods or there's a better way please let me know! Also, I'd love to hear if you use the code, or make any modifications, or whatever.

Cheers,

David

P.S. I'm pretty sure there must be a better way to implement GetImageAltText and GetImagePath let me know if you know what that is!

using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web;
using umbraco.presentation.nodeFactory;
using umbraco.BusinessLogic;
using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.member;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Xml.XPath;

namespace WebGarden.Utilities
{
    public static class UmbracoHelper
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Get the name of the specified node
        /// from the Umbraco content section
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="productId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetContentNodeName(int nodeId)
        {
            // Get the countries from the Umbraco content - children of the Countries node
            Node n = new Node(nodeId);

            return n.Name;
        }

        public static string GetContentNodeProperty(string appSettingName, string propertyName)
        {
            if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName] == null)
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The app setting {0} does not exist in the web.config. It should exist and contain the id of an Umbraco node.", appSettingName));
            }

            int nodeId = 0;
            if (!int.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName], out nodeId))
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The app setting {0} in the web.config does not contain a valid integer. It should contain the id of an Umbraco node.", appSettingName));
            }

            return GetContentNodeProperty(nodeId, propertyName);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Get the value of the named attribute of the specified node
        /// from the Umbraco content section
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="productId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetContentNodeProperty(int nodeId, string propertyName)
        {
            // Get the countries from the Umbraco content - children of the Countries node
            Node n = new Node(nodeId);

            if (n == null || n.Id == 0)
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The requested node (id {0}) was not found by WebGarden.Utilities.GetUmbracoContentNodeProperty when looking for the {1} property", nodeId, propertyName));
            }

            if (n.GetProperty(propertyName) == null)
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The property {0} does not exist in the current node {1} (id {2})", propertyName, n.Name, nodeId));
            }
            return n.GetProperty(propertyName).Value;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Get the value of the named attribute of the CURRENT node
        /// from the Umbraco content section
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="productId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetCurrentNodeProperty(string propertyName)
        {
            return GetContentNodeProperty(Node.GetCurrent().Id, propertyName);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Takes the name of an appsetting in the web.config and returns the umbraco nice url to the node
        /// Assumes that the App Setting exists and contains a valid Umbraco node id
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="appSettingName"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetNiceUrlFromAppSetting(string appSettingName)
        {
            if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName] == null)
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The app setting {0} does not exist in the web.config. It should exist and contain the id of an Umbraco node.", appSettingName));
            }

            int nodeId = 0;
            if (!int.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName], out nodeId))
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The app setting {0} in the web.config does not contain a valid integer. It should contain the id of an Umbraco node.", appSettingName));
            }

            return umbraco.library.NiceUrl(nodeId);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Takes the name of an appsetting in the web.config and returns the umbraco node
        /// Assumes that the App Setting exists and contains a valid Umbraco node id
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="appSettingName"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static Node GetNodeFromAppSetting(string appSettingName)
        {
            if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName] == null)
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The app setting {0} does not exist in the web.config. It should exist and contain the id of an Umbraco node.", appSettingName));
            }

            int nodeId = 0;
            if (!int.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName], out nodeId))
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("The app setting {0} in the web.config does not contain a valid integer. It should contain the id of an Umbraco node.", appSettingName));
            }

            return new Node(nodeId);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Recursive function to find a content node based on a property value
        /// Checks the propertyName property of each node, and if it matches value then returns 
        /// the id of the node
        /// If the node has children, then it recurses the tree until a match is found
        /// Returns -1 if no match is found
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="propertyName"></param>
        /// <param name="value"></param>
        /// <param name="rootNodeId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static int GetNodeIdByProperty(string documentType, string propertyName, string value, int rootNodeId)
        {
            Node n = new Node(rootNodeId);
            int result = -1;

            foreach (Node child in n.Children)
            {
                // If it's a node with the correct documenttype, then check the property value.
                if (child.NodeTypeAlias.ToLower().Equals(documentType.ToLower()))
                {
                    if (child.GetProperty(propertyName).Value.Equals(value))
                    {
                        return child.Id;
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    // If node has child nodes - recurse over them to find your required node
                    if (child.Children.Count > 0)
                    {
                        result = GetNodeIdByProperty(documentType, propertyName, value, child.Id);
                        if (result != -1)
                        {
                            return result;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            return result;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Get the value of the named attribute from the Umbraco settings node
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="productId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetSettingsNodeProperty(string propertyName)
        {
            int nodeId = -1;
            if (int.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["UmbracoSettingsNodeId"], out nodeId))
            {
                // Get the named attribute from the Settings node in Umbraco
                Node n = new Node(nodeId);

                if (n.GetProperty(propertyName) == null)
                {
                    throw new Exception(String.Format("A property called {0} was expected in the Umbraco settings node (id: {1}). Note that this is case sensitive.", propertyName, nodeId));
                }
                return n.GetProperty(propertyName).Value;
            }
            else
            {
                throw new Exception("You must enter a valid integer for UmbracoSettingsNodeId in the web.config");
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Takes the id of an image in the media section of Umbraco and returns the alt text
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="mediaId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetImageAltText(int mediaId)
        {
            // Get the path to the image
            XPathNodeIterator xImage = umbraco.library.GetMedia(mediaId, true);
            XPathNodeIterator nodes = xImage.Current.Select("/node/data[@alias='altText']");
            string path = string.Empty;

            while (nodes.MoveNext())
            {
                path = nodes.Current.Value;
                break;
            }
            return path;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Takes the id of an image in the media section of Umbraco and returns the path to that image
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="mediaId"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string GetImagePath(int mediaId)
        {
            // Get the path to the image
            XPathNodeIterator xImage = umbraco.library.GetMedia(mediaId, true);
            XPathNodeIterator nodes = xImage.Current.Select("/node/data[@alias='umbracoFile']");
            string path = string.Empty;

            while (nodes.MoveNext())
            {
                path = nodes.Current.Value;
                break;
            }
            return path;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Takes a list of nodes, a property name and a value, and returns a list of nodes 
        /// where the property value matches the value. Case insensitive.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="nodes"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static List<Node> TrimNodeListByProperty(List<Node> nodes, string propertyName, string value)
        {
            List<Node> results = new List<Node>();

            foreach (Node n in nodes)
            {
                if (n.GetProperty(propertyName).Value.ToLower() == value.ToLower())
                {
                    results.Add(n);
                }
            }

            return results;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Returns the children of a node as a list.
        /// The id of the parent node is taken from the named AppSetting in the web.config file
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="appSettingName">The name of an AppSetting that contains the parent node id</param>
        /// <returns>A List of Nodes</returns>
        public static List<Node> GetNodeChildrenFromAppSetting(string appSettingName)
        {
            int nodeId = -1;
            List<Node> results = new List<Node>();

            if (int.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[appSettingName], out nodeId))
            {
                Node n = new Node(nodeId);

                foreach (Node child in n.Children)
                {
                    results.Add(child);
                }
            }
            else
            {
                throw new Exception(String.Format("You must enter a valid integer for the {0} setting in the web.config", appSettingName));
            }
            return results;
        }     
    }
}

Codegarden 2009 is now open for registrations, and with a very generous €150 off the price for early registration (before March 31st). I went last year to my first Codegarden, and it was excellent. A nicer bunch of folk is hard to meet, and I made some solid friends there who I'm looking forward to seeing again this year.

But of course the focus is Umbraco, and as a freelance Umbraco developer going to Codegarden was probably one of the best decisions I made in my first year of business. Armed with a box of business cards, I made some excellent connections and of course I learned a hell of a lot about Umbraco. It just went 'click!' in my brain as I saw what people were doing with Umbraco for their sites - and I could then do for my clients.

Anyway, I think it's obvious that I highly recommend a trip to Copenhagen. It's June 22nd and 23rd, and it's going to be great. See you there?