Dear Umbracians,

I want to use Umbraco in order to build and maintain multiple websites. Every single website is going to have its own set of controls.

I am trying to find a way to keep everything as loosely coupled as possible. I would like to be able to have somebody else develop a .NET control and then use that in an existing Umbraco installation.

So that means not having to add my own server side C# code, not having to rebuild, not having to republish.

For a moment, I thought user controls were the answer. But user controls can only be used when the Umbraco rendering engine is set to WebForms. I'm not sure whether this is a good idea, because recent Umbraco releases are meant to work with MVC4.

Is making use of the WebForms rendering engine recommended? Or will this be deprecated in the future?

Also, I haven't been able to figure out how to set public properties on user controls from within Umbraco, the same way I can from VS.NET. Is this possible?

It strikes me as odd that I would have to switch to an old rendering engine in order to do something I can't do with MVC4. What are my options (read: alternatives to user controls) for integrating third party functionalities with Umbraco MVC?

I realize that I could have the loose coupling I desire by simply scripting everything client side. Adding pages and scripts that communicate with external services is not a problem. But I'd like to know if there is a way to loosely couple a third party component that makes use of server side (C#) code.

Please advise.

Sincerely,

Jay