Setting up local development environment for Umbraco

Question

I have inherited an Umbraco CMS project, the Umbraco instance and custom user controls exist on our test server as the initial build has been demo-ed to the client already.

Answer 1

If you have IIS Express installed, what I have found easiest is to:

1. Copy the filesystem of the site from the server to a folder in the Inetpub of your local machine.
2. Create a site in IIS and point to those files.
3. In Visual Studio, click File, Open, Website, and then choose the site.

If you have the MVC Framework installed, syntax highlighting will work for razor (.cshtml) scripts.

One step further would be to make a copy of the database and point the connection string to that copy. The copy could be restored to another database server, or if you have SQL Server Express installed, you can run the copy locally as well.