2021 saw the release of the newest member of the Umbraco family, Umbraco 9, and with it came some exciting updates, including the migration to .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core bringing with it many new features and performance improvements.
At first glance, it might be hard to notice any differences between version 8 of Umbraco and version 9, but this is by design to ensure a consistent content management experience for editors migrating across to the newer version. Most of the change has happened under the hood, with a modernised technical stack, cleaner architecture, and performance improvements across the board.
The familiar UI means that Umbraco editors who love the existing Umbraco content experience and built in features from version 8 will feel right at home with Umbraco 9 as everything is just as it was. For new editors using Umbraco for the first time, they will get to experience the same editor-friendly features that makes Umbraco a popular choice for content managed sites.
With the migration of Umbraco 9 to .NET 5, the Umbraco team have taken the opportunity to optimise the codebase and also align more closely with standard .NET 5 concepts such as utilising the native implementations for configuration and dependency injection.
Aligning closely with .NET standard concepts is another developer experience benefit as developers who already have .NET 5 backgrounds, but not necessarily Umbraco specific knowledge will no longer have an additional learning curve when it comes to implementing Umbraco sites.
.NET 5 has been built with performance at the forefront, taking advantage of newer hardware and architectural principles to deliver faster, more optimised applications.
Umbraco 9 benefits from these improvements out of the box and with Umbraco 9 also being fully compatible with the upcoming .NET 6, more performance improvements are still to come. What this means in practice is that Umbraco sites will be less resource intensive, more performant with faster loading pages.
With .NET 5, Microsoft has moved the .NET framework away from running exclusively on Windows based systems and embraced true cross-platform compatibility, meaning .NET 5 runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux.
For developers, this means much more freedom in picking their platform of choice to develop Umbraco 9 solutions, tailoring the development experience to whatever platform preference they may have. No more virtual machines if you are a Umbraco developer not using Windows, Umbraco 9 will not just run natively!
For hosting, .NET 5 delivers much more flexibility as to where Umbraco 9 can be deployed with both Linux and Windows environments available. Alternatively, if a more service-oriented platform is required, Umbraco Cloud supports Umbraco 9 natively too, so all hosting bases are covered.
Here at CTI we're a Umbraco Gold Partner and have been working with Umbraco since the early days of version 7. Umbraco 9 constitutes a big technical shift with improved performance and developer experience whilst still maintaining the familiar interface which makes Umbraco so loved by content editors.
If you are thinking of migrating an existing site to Umbraco 9 or looking to start a new digital adventure with Umbraco, then please get in touch.