Tridion and .Net

Apart from the SDL acquisition, there were some other interesting topics covered at the Tridion World conference last wednesday and thursday. The one I found most interesting was the sneak preview of R5.3.

Tridion seems to be moving in the right direction technologically;
* What they demo'd was the integration with MS Visual Studio; At last the templates can be developed in .Net and in a real IDE instead of a browser text field. They can even be debugged locally! If you've never worked with Tridion as a developer you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about, but this is actually a huge step forward.
* Another thing that a lot of us have been waiting for for a long time, is the ability to publish binary content in the folder of your choice, and not all in the same one. Digital assets all ended up in the same 'Images' folder before, resulting in one folder that could contain thousands of images and caused some hassle in certain situations. This will finally be taken care of in the new version.
* There will be some workflow enhancements, hopefully making that part ready for more than just the simple "yeah it looks ok, publish it" type of workflow.
* Tridion's side product ContentPorter, used mainly to move content and templates from one Tridion server to another, is said to have a new version underway with many many enhancements. They didn't demo that or detail the changes however, so we'll have to wait and see. But it all sounds very promising.

Tridion must have spent a fortune on research and development to get all those new features in. Perhaps that's why the acquisition by SDL suddenly looked like a great idea ;-)