Umbraco 9 just around the corner

The Release Candidate of will be published shortly Umbraco 9, that is, the version already ready for production, to which some minor adjustments will be added before it is released with the official release.

We are in front of the The most groundbreaking version in the history of Umbraco and yet, we have practically no new functionality compared to Umbraco 8. Where is the revolution then? The revolution is under the hood, and the fact is that the engine (framework) that has given life to Umbraco until today has been completely changed from .Net 4 to .Net Core. The main advantages of Umbraco 9 then are the .Net Core. We are going to analyze them.

Since the ascension of the current CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella back in 2014, the company's strategy changed radically and went from a closed and proprietary environment to turning to open source to approach professionals wherever they were, regardless of their operating system and technological universe. This strategy was completed with the release of .Net Core, a free and open source framework for Windows, Linux and MacOS operating systems. This means that someone can program with Umbraco 9 from their Mac together with a colleague who works on Windows and publishing the web to a Linux server.

Main advantages of the combination of .Net Core and Umbraco

Now let's see some advantages that the sum of .Net Core and Umbraco provides us with in order to assess when it will be convenient for us to carry out a migration. Quoting Daft Punk, we could describe Umbraco 9 as Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

Harder

One of the reasons that has made Umbraco 9 popular among programmers has been the consistency with .Net MVC standards. If you know well how to implement MVC, you know Umbraco. With the migration to .Net Core, other standards and good practices have opened opportunities to offer a more robust architecture such as the extended use of dependency injection using MSDI or the execution of tasks in the background with Hosted Services.

Better

The more, the better, the saying goes, because Umbraco, a time relegated only to programmers in Windows environments, with the release of version 9 opens its arms to any programmer in the world who wants to approach this CMS and this fantastic community.

For both development and hosting, Umbraco will work exactly the same way. It no longer matters if the laptop looks like an apple, a penguin or a window, all developers will have the same experience and will be able to collaborate together on the same projects.

Faster

.NET Core is faster than. NET Framework. It has been reprogrammed from scratch always with performance in mind, taking advantage of new hardware and software that the old .Net would not be able to take advantage of.

This means that, for certain scenarios, we could see improvements that would double or even tenfold performance and also multiply the possibilities and benefits of scalability.

Stronger

The migration from Umbraco to .Net Core aligns the CMS with the official .Net roadmap, thus adding to this new generation of development, services and ways of collaboration.
Umbraco 9 will be released for .Net 5 and the update to subsequent versions of .Net will be continuous, ensuring a solid future that will take advantage of all the strengths of the framework.

Migration from Umbraco 8 to Umbraco 9

There will be no automated migration and the difficulty of the migration will have to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. To get an idea of the difficulty of migration, we must understand that the database schema remains exactly the same, while the internal libraries and the rendering system have changed dramatically. This means that a website that has tens of thousands of pages, but little variety of pages, little logic and few integrations, such as a blog, will have a very simple migration and will be able to take advantage of all the performance advantages. On the contrary, a page with many varieties of templates and complex integrations will require a deep refactoring of the project.

You can find more information about Umbraco 9 at the following link: Migrating Umbraco to .NET Core. If you are considering a migration to Umbraco 9 or starting a project from scratch and want to consult us, leave us a message here on the web and we will get in touch with you.

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.