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People
Happy New Year to Everybody!
Time does fly fast! More than a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the then upcoming 2008 and just a wink later it's already 2009! Last year was one that passed by at light speed... I've noticed that when you are at work and you're focused on the daily grind, you often see only the challenges and think about how slow you are progressing. It's great that there are holidays when you slow down a bit and you have time to look back and see that things are much different. At New Year's Eve my wife and I were... -
Web
Marketing and Silverlight, configuring cross-domain banners
I have been part of Telerik’s Silverlight team for almost a year now, and I too well know that our marketing team is just two floors away to say anything bad about marketing. So I will just say that now having Silverlight 2 in its official version out, marketing mix should adopt one more P in its four P’s concept, Ptechnology. That is why, I will try to explain this topic step by step, so that all marketing guys attracted by the name of this topic can delete the first paragraph and give it to their development teams for consideration.... -
Desktop WPF
Putting Instructional Prompts in Controls
When asking the user to provide input in any application it can help to give them guidance on what you are expecting. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, but one in particular seems to be very effective. If you have ever used Microsoft PowerPoint you will undoubtedly have seen a screen similar to the graphic below. The instructional prompt effectively conveys to the user where to type a title and subtitle for the slide. Better yet, the user can ignore these prompts and proceed with other activities in the application. Live Search Map provides another example of... -
Productivity Testing
A Vote for Extensibility in Test Automation Solutions
I hope I haven’t confused anyone mentioning the weak points of test automation in my previous post. The gained experience however indicates the importance of looking into test automation based on straight-forward and easily maintained solutions. That’s a problem people have been trying to solve for more then a decade now. In the current post I’d like to get your attention to a key of successful test automation via using the tools extensibility. Nowadays there are plenty of test automation solutions especially for the well-known platforms like ASP.NET Web. Should you consider automate your testing activities, you will probably ...December 26, 2008 3 min read -
Productivity
Visual Studio: “Error Creating Control”
I’ve run into this error before and last night it reared its ugly head again. You’ll find it from time to time when switching to Design View in Visual Studio to work with custom server controls. The bug is in Service Pack 1 of VS and can be quite annoying. It has been submitted to Microsoft and they claim to be working on a solution which will “fix it in subsequent releases” of Visual Studio. Unfortunately, developers (like me) don’t want their productivity to suffer while we all wait for a fix from Microsoft. So here are a couple of steps...December 24, 2008 1 min read -
Release
Want to help us build better Silverlight controls?
We started a survey to gain your mostly valuable feedback on your experience and expectations with the Silverlight platform and the controls we provide. Your involvement will be much appreciated and you will be awarded 1000 Telerik points for taking the survey. We want to direct our future Silverlight development into building the critical and most important blocks for your existing or future Silverlight applications. You can take the survey at: Silverlight SurveyPeopleConferences?
I was thinking about how professional conferences and the accompanying them trade shows are a great place for networking, finding out what’s hot in the industry and learning from the leading experts in the field. I still believe that conferences are very useful but I am starting to have some second thoughts about the tradeshows. Considering the myriad of online communication recourses available to companies for interacting with their customers and the community, and the global economy crisis, 2009 will be an interesting year. I decided to post this to see if you have any opinion on the subject. I think it will be interesting...December 23, 2008 1 min readWebA Tip to Play with RadControls for Silverlight Themes
There are several built-in themes in RadControls for Silverlight that I’m sure the SL developers are pretty interested in. You can easily see how the themed controls look like after building a simple Silverlight application and setting any of the predefined themes. You shouldn’t miss the themes demo that allows applying a theme of the controls by a single button click. I’d like to give you another tip and at the same time to share something from the Telerik Silverlight kitchen. The tip gives you a chance to get quickly all the controls themed in a complex application containing tens ...December 23, 2008 2 min readReleaseNew support resources search facilities on telerik.com
Greetings everyone, With the brand new look-and-feel of telerik.com we introduced for the landmark Q3 2008 release you probably noticed that the support resources searching capabilities have changed, too. Our aim was to expose intuitive and straight-forward means to browse the available resources based on their type and find the information/examples you need in a blink of an eye. In a nutshell, we would like each visitor to have the ability to search by product line and get a list of results with a leading indicator image designating the resource type (demo, help topic, knowledge base article, code library project, etc.). Since a...WebHow To: Strongly typed values for your TextBoxes
Very often you need to parse/convert TextBox Text property value to some other type however I’ve never seen any universal approach for this so far… and I’m offering you one :) using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; public static class TextBoxExtensions { public static T Value<T>(this TextBox textBox) { return (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(textBox.Text))? ChangeType<T>(textBox.Text) : default(T); } public static T ChangeType<T>(object value) { return (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(typeof(T)) ?? typeof(T)); } } It's simple, isn't it? :)...