DEV Community: Dave Woestenborghs

Debugging the Umbraco source code for specific version

Dave Woestenborghs — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 16:11:27 +0000

Today I had to debug the Umbraco source code to pinpoint a performance issue.

I already had a backup of the umbraco database from our live environment restored on my local machine.

Normally when I contribute to the Umbraco CMS, I work on my own fork on the contrib branch before creating a pull request.

Problem is that I had to debug Umbraco 10.6.1 and the contrib branch is already V12.x. There is v10/dev branch, but that is already running Umbraco 10.7.x

Luckily Umbraco tags all the releases on github so I went ahead and downloaded the source code for v10.6.1

I followed the steps to get up and running from the documentation.

From a command line I did the following to build the front end code :

cd src\Umbraco.Web.UI.Client
npm install
npm run dev

This succeeded without issues.

Then I tried to build and run the CMS from a command line as described in the documentation :

dotnet watch --project .\src\Umbraco.Web.UI\Umbraco.Web.UI.csproj

But here I ran into a issue.

I saw the following errors in my console :

error MSB4044: The "GetUmbracoBuildVersion" task was not given a value for the required parameter "Git CommitIdShort".
When building the source code on my forked repository I don't see this error.

This is because Umbraco is using GitVersion for semantic versioning.
This requires a git repository and at least one commit. When you just download the code you don't have a git repository.

This was easily fixed by running the following commands :

git init
git add .
git commit -m "initial"

After that I could run the CMS without any issues.

So I hope this helps you when you run into this issue.

Nuget restore issues after Umbraco upgrade

Dave Woestenborghs — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 12:58:39 +0000

Ever experienced other developers in your team reporting issues with the Umbraco backend after you did a upgrade of the CMS using nuget ?

I have. But I never really figured out what was causing it. So often I gave the following 3 options to them :

Force a nuget reinstall
Download the zip and extract the umbraco folder.
Get a new clone from source control.

Lately people started reporting issues on the forum and issue tracker after upgrades to 8.12.2

So what is going on ?

As far as I can see is that everybody reporting issues is using Visual Studio and have installed Umbraco using Nuget. I suspect most of them also exclude the umbraco folder from source control.

That is how I set up my Umbraco projects as well.

So in this setup one person upgrades umbraco locally by updating the umbraco nuget packages. This person will not experience the issues. After the upgrade the changes are pushed to source control and other team members will pull them to their local environment. When they build the solution visual studio will restore the upgraded nuget packages.

But running the backoffice will suddenly produce errors on their machine.

So why is this ? Apparently a nuget restore just downloads the packages but does not copy the files to your VS project. This is a long known [issue[(https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/3787) with nuget. But this also means your umbraco folder does not get updated when restoring the nuget package.

How can we fix this ?

There are several ways how to deal with this problem. I already mentioned 3 earlier, but these manual steps to be taken. So let's have a look at some other options.

Source control the umbraco folder

This has the advantage that all changes in the umbraco folder made by nuget upgrades are in source control.

But personally I don't like this approach. You will be including more than 2500 files in your source control that you will not be changing yourself.

You don't include your /node_modules or /packages folder in source control either.

The official documentation actually mentions you should exclude the folder from source control.

Including the umbraco folder in the VS Project

When you set up a website in Visual Studio and install Umbraco using nuget by default the umbraco folder is not included in the VS project. And remember that I said earlier that the umbraco does not get updated when restoring the nuget package. This is the reason.

So a easy way to include your umbraco folder in your vs solution is by adding this to your csproj file

<Content Include="umbraco\**\*.*" />

With this line in place a nuget restore will add all missing files to the folder.

My personal preference goes to this solution.

What do you think ?

I am interested in hearing from others if theu source control the umbraco folder or not. Or that they have experienced issues like this before.

Let's make Umbraco great again

Dave Woestenborghs — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 10:07:57 +0000

TLDR; Umbraco is still great, but there is always room for improvement.

Yesterday I my thoughts on a blog post written by Tim Geyssens.

So today I will try to give some ideas on how to improve.

Commercial product support

Some people will want everything to be open source and free. But for Umbraco to be sustainable there needs to be a revenue stream to pay the bills and salaries.

As I see it they have several ways to generate income :

Selling partnerships and support contracts
Offering training
Commercial add-ons like Forms
Umbraco.tv
Cloud (including Heartcore and Uno)

Having this income enabled Umbraco HQ to grow and this directly affected the core open source project.

Back in the day you had a bigger chance of finding a penguin on the northpole than getting support through the official channels. Now they have a lot of support warriors and so this area has improved a lot.

Also the core product has become more stable. Remember trying to do a upgrade back in the v3/v4 days. Only masochists kept up to date with the latest versions.

But back to the commercial product support, especially Umbraco Forms. We all know, and HQ even acknowlegded it, that it needs some TLC. But somehow this is not happening, or not fast and visible enough for the end users.

I don't know the exact reasons. But let's assume the revenue generated by selling Forms licenses is not high enough to do active maintenance.

So this can be solved in several ways :

Increase the price tag. This is the easiest solution. But raising the price tag could have the effect that is not affordable for everybody and thus decreasing the number of licenses sold. On the other hand if you need several hours tracking down a bug, creating a bug report and doing the follow up this easily evens out a increased price tag for a product that is actively supported.
Don't give it away for free on cloud. I know this is done to make Cloud offering more attractive, but this is a lot of money they are giving away for free. If they are hosting 5000 websites on cloud they are giving away €945000 for free. If only 10% of that amount was invested back into Forms that could pay for a lot of development hours.
Make it commercial open source. Still have the need for a license to run it in production, but open the source code to community contributions. Maybe only for Gold Partners. So you have extra selling point for a Gold Partnership : access to commercial product source code. Could also be a criteria that you need x number of amounts of PR's before you are able to contribute. And of course there needs to be HQ steward to guide everything.

Personally I think the last option is the best, because you have people who are actual users of the product, drive the product development.

But even with it's current flaws Umbraco Forms is still a great product compared to the formsbuilders in other (commercial) content management systems.

Gold Partner Support

Selling gold partnerships is another way for generating income for Umbraco HQ. And also in this area there has been a lot of improvement.

I know this is very short sighted, but back in the day, it was basicly donating money to HQ. And I was fine with that, after all you build your business around something you get for free.

But now there are several perks of becoming a Gold Partner

Free training : one online and one in the Gold Partner academy. As a bonus you get more Umbraco.tv accounts than you need.
Discount on cloud subscriptions. You get a professional plan at a big discount, while you can still charge your clients the full amount. If you have a lot of projects this pays for the Gold Partnership
Full Umbraco support

While the first 2 are for convincing management to become Gold Partner, the last one is important for developers.

And that could be improved in my opinion. The following is said on the Gold Partner page on umbraco.com about the support

We’ve got your back.

You'll be given a guaranteed lifeline directly into Umbraco HQ and our dedicated support team who are able to support you on both the Umbraco CMS and Umbraco Cloud. So if you’re ever having troubles with Umbraco, you're not left alone - contact us and we'll guide you back on track.

But this is not just a lifeline for you - it is also a guarantee for your clients. A guarantee that you've got direct access to the Umbraco HQ support team, should something come up in their project. A guarantee that will help them feel confident (and comfortable) in choosing you to handle their project.

But that's until you read the fine print on the bugfix warranty page.

There it states that only bugs of severity 1 (security, stability or data loss issues) will be fixed within 7 days. But these are the kind of bugs I expect to see fixed ASAP anyhow, regardless of being Gold Partner or not.

To clarify with a example. I encountered a bug in Umbraco. I knew I could workaround this by writing custom code. But in the spirit of open source I created a PR for fixing the bug. This was tested and proven to fix the issue. So I went to through the official channels and opened a Gold Partner ticket as well through the backchannels to get this in a patch release. In both cases I got the response it wasn't severity one so I was not entitled to special patch release. Later on the fixed was classified as breaking so a patch release was not possible.

So I implemented my workaround and got my project live. I reported the bug on Umbraco 8.3 but had to wait until 8.6 was out before I could remove the custom code. That is still 3 minor releases before it got in.

Imagine they handled the other way around. A patch release was possible and they created it. I know I would have been very vocal about thanking HQ for this. That would have been free advertising for becoming Gold Partner. Everybody happy.

Visibility of community

If your read my previous blog post you know I did not agree with Tim about community engagement being way down. I think it is more active than ever. But just in different ways than back in the old days.

But maybe things should be made more visible. Not sure on how and where to do that. Is umbraco.com or our.umbraco.com the place for that.

Maybe give people a incentive to contribute like Gatsby does. You would be surprised what people would do for a free T-shirt.

So if you have ideas please reach out here in the comments or on twitter. My DM's are open if you don't want to do it publicly.

HQ is hearing us

After our blogs Tim and I got a invite to visit Umbraco HQ to have a open discussion about the issues raised. But at the moment COVID-19 measures are preventing me to travel to Denmark. Thanks to Kim Sneum Madsen for the invite.

What's next ?

First off al people need to let go of how things were "back in the day". If still were still the same I don't think Umbraco still existed. Things changing is a natural consequence of growing.

I hope we can get a (virtual) platform where we, as a community, can express our concerns in a constructive manner. The round table discussions that happened were a good starting point.

In the end everybody benefits from a better Umbraco.

And we are in this together. Umbraco HQ would not exist without the community and vice versa.

Is Umbraco really a tourist trap ? My point of view.

Dave Woestenborghs — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 15:04:06 +0000

Yesterday Tim Geyssens posted a blog about his concerns regarding the direction Umbraco CMS is or is not going.

So I would like to share my thoughts on his observations.

Exhibit A - Commercial product(s) without support

I can totally agree with this one. Forms needs attention. We heard this being worked on. But in my opinion this is long overdue.

Especially when you raise a ticket as a Gold Partner. One of the selling points of the Gold Partnership is that support will have your back. But from experience I know that you will get the answer that only severity one bugs (security, site instability) will be picked up.

Exhibit B - No affordable way to learn and keep your Umbraco knowledge up to date.

Again I agree. When I started out using Umbraco taking all the training courses (level 1 and level 2) would cost you about €2000. That's a big increase over a decade of time. I wish my salary made the same increase.

Umbraco.tv would have been a nice low-budget entry point in to training, but it needs some new content.

Exhibit C - "New" product that gets a sloppy release

I won't go into it if the release was sloppy or not. But I was surprised the release happened at all.

I don't think this is a product the community was waiting for. But I stand corrected if it happens to be.

To me it feels Umbraco wants get into a market that is already taken IMHO (Wix, Squarespace, ...) and competes directly with what the community is doing : building sites on top of Umbraco.

I haven't tested it, but seeing the screenshots with a plethora of options, goes directly against a unique selling point of Umbraco : a tailored editing experience. People new to Umbraco trying this out can get the wrong image of what Umbraco can do for them.

I think HQ needs to decide what they want Umbraco to be. A flexible CMS that can be tailored to your projects needs and be capable of doing "small" websites aswell as big enterprise projects.... Or a sitebuilder.

You can't have your cake and eat it.

The effort and resources used to build this should have been used to fix Forms and some of the recurring issues of Umbraco Cloud.

Exhibit D - False stats on the umbraco.com homepage

Personally I don't care about stats. 75% of all statistics are made up ;-)

This is just a marketing number.

But I can say the community is bigger and more active than ever. And I am also a long time user of Umbraco (since 2008). But people are engaging in other ways than in the past, where it was mainly forum posts and releasing packages.

People are now contributing more in other ways... There has never been more contributions to core by the community than now. I can speak from experience having been part of the PR team for 2 year. Also people are writing documentation...which did not even exist back in the day. People are organising virtual meet ups, doing podcasts, ....
Not every contribution has to be code related.

But what I do notice is that some of the "old timers" have moved on to something else.. But I think that is natural. Once I was active member of the DNN community, but I don't think anybody will remember that.

I also used to be very active member on the forum, but my interest moved more to code contributions so I am not that active anymore over there. This makes me less visible, but I am still active.

Exhibit...

Content apps are useful in my opinion. But mostly on a project basis. That is why you don't see many packages that have one.
AngularJs still does the job, but to stay relevant a better and newer tech should be used. But before this can happen a lot of refactoring needs to be done. There is a work in progress to remove as much of the angular code as possible. A good place to start helping out.

My Observations

It is no secret I (and probably many others) was very disappointed in the way how V8 was released.

First of all the timing. At some point 3 test tracks were announced before V8 would be released : editor, implementor and contributor. Each of these groups could provide feedback. But from the editor track they went straight to release, skipping 2 important tracks. This put a lot of stress on package developers. They got a lot of questions like "When will package x be compatible with V8". But because of lacking documentation and a lot of breaking changes porting a package was not a easy tasks. I still haven't ported all of mine.

Then there was communication...

Blog posts saying that is ready for production and that you should migrate. But it was not stable, lacking documentation and no way to migrate.

This took a way my energy to the extend I stopped contributing and sharing. But luckily there were some community members I could talk to who helped me overcome this.

Now what ?

I think HQ is having growing pains as a commercial entity, while it needs to keep in touch with the community needs. And can be the cause of frustration on both ends.

But people need to speak up otherwise HQ is not aware of this. So I am glad Tim wrote this blog post. Although I don't agree with all the things he said, it inspired me to do the same.

So if HQ is open for a constructive and open discussion... So am I.