Currently, I work a lot with Umbraco. I am loving it a lot for a lot of good things (flexibility, possibility to go hard-core, good user experience, wonderful community). One part I was not 100% fond of is the macros part. Although macros (I mostly use MVC macros) are great in many respects, they quickly result in overcomplicated pieces of code with a very unhealthy mix of html and C# code.

One of those overcomplicating macros in my situation is the menu macro. Therefore, when the SurfaceController was ported from Umbraco 5 to Umbraco 4.10 (and above) I decided to rebuild my menu and breadcrumbs macros into a new navigation surface controller (called, how surprising, NavigationSurfaceController).

In this blog post, I will try to highlight some parts of the surface controller when I have some spare time to do so.

In the mean time, or when you are simply looking for all the code, feel free to download the source code zip. Don’t expect a working solution, just copy the files in your own solution (Umbraco extensions dll or even the main project) and start enjoying . I would love to get feedback!

Happy coding!