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Welcome to the umbraco Christmas Calendar – 24 small and large tips ‘n’ tricks over the next – surprise – 24 days. We’ll start out nice and slow:

Every day is almost like Christmas when working with umbraco. We don’t have a santa, but we do have a Christmas tree online 24-7. It’s called the Package Repository and if you’re not aware about its existence, you’re missing a lot.

The package repository is a centralized server containing packages approved by the Package Repository Group (PRG). It already contain useful packages to speed up your development, but much more are on its way as the fine folk of the PRG is hunting, testing and collecting packages around the community.

The Package Repository is completely integrated into umbraco v3 and can be accessed by:

1. Right click “Macros” in the “Developer” section and choose “Import Package”:
   
2. In the pop-up window select “Browse Package Repository” and you’re now in the candy store ready to automatically download and install packages to your umbraco installation.
   

Throughout this Calendar I’ll be using several of the packages in the repository and with a little luck the repository will already grow in December.

The Package Repository can grow asynchronously with the umbraco core, meaning that your umbraco installation will get access to more and more functionality as the community grows – umbraco will simply become better the more people are using it.

So go ahead and explore the Repository and play around with the packages. See you again tomorrow for more tips ‘n’ tricks in December

Microsoft released VS2008 on the MSDN Subscriptions network yesterday, and I'm happy to announce that it's easy to get umbraco to compile on the latest version of our favorite developer tool:

The only adjustments I need to add was updating the usage of the Action class in umbraco to use the fully qualified name as .NET 3.5 introduces a new delegate named "Action". I've added more details in the forum.

If you're based in the London area, come join Per and I for a London meet-up at the wonderful offices of SAS Design in Bayswater, who're our fine hosts for this event.

A meetup is a very informal form, which basically means that we have a room, a projector, a bunch of great people with an interest in umbraco. It's a good chance to get a London based user group started and it's also a good chance to ask questions to me and Per. If you got a particular topic you want covered or got a cool thing to demo, leave a notice in the comments.

The details:

When: November 29th at 18.00
Where: SAS Design, 6 Salem Rd, Westminister, London W2 (map)
Price: It's free of course :-)
Later: There's a pub across the road, so... 

The room can hold around 15 people, so please respond in the comments if you're coming (and please let us know if you have to cancel).

There has been numerous reports on random NULL reference bugs with v3, especially on unstable shared hosts or on servers with many umbraco sites. We finally found the bug which is related to cache references and are currently testing on a larger number of sites. We'll commit the changes Tuesday this week to the source repository on CodePlex and release a patch version 3.0.4 this week (unfortunately we can't easily add the source to the repo right now due to 3.1 dev being the main branch on cp. We'll add the full source code as a separate download to the release).

Sorry for the inconvenience, but the patch is an easy, non-destructive, assemblies only update which should only take a few minutes and won't affect your site in any way (other than obviously get rid of the NULL reference bugs).

Inspired by DotNetDave's blog post on his impressions on umbraco after implementing his first website, I added a new component to our bug tracker - "frustrations". It's the sort of things that can be hard to place in a specific category or maybe even hard to justify as a bug. It's the tiny things that pisses you of when implementing or using umbraco. It's small things. Things that shouldn't take long to fix. It's things that make you frustrated and for one thing - it's the things that needs to go away.

So I'm introducing the "Fighting Frustrations" campaign. For the rest of the year, let's get those frustrations collected and fixed for v3.1. Add your frustrations to our bug tracker and choose "Frustrations" as the component pre-fix your titles with "Frustration: " (choosing components is only available for the core team members apparently.

Now remember - this is for the small things, like "why do I need to write an xslt macro just to insert an image from a mediapicker", "why doesn't the XSLT editor insert references to my XSLT extensions automatically" or "why does the WYSIWYG clean pasted content when using the paste button, but not CTRL+V".

When you've submitted your bug, remember to tell other people to vote it up. The frustrations that gets the most votes, will get highest priority.

No more talking, let's walk to a new place with less frustrations. Go submit.