Appointment sample data crashes Blend designer

[Philipp]

I installed RADControls on my system today in order to evaluate the ScheduleView, and I just can't get any sample data into Blend. I ended up creating a simplistic view model that just exposes an ObservableCollection<IAppointment> and the generated sample data still causes the designer to crash with a null reference exception. I then copied the data from the demos into the file, but with the same result, so for now, I'm at a loss.

Thanks for your advice
Philipp

[Dani]

Hi Philipp,

Expression Blend will not respect data bindings for its design-time. It will not display sample data unless that data is declaratively set. So to be able to see the active view as well as some sample appointments, waht you can do is declare the sample data in xaml.

Please, consider the following example:

<telerik:RadScheduleView Margin="0,24,0,26">

            <telerik:RadScheduleView.AppointmentsSource>
                <scheduleView:ObservableAppointmentCollection>
                    <scheduleView:Appointment Subject="Introduction to WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 Developers"
            Start="11/07/2011 12:00AM" End="11/07/2011 2:00AM"/>
                    <scheduleView:Appointment Subject="What's New in WCF 4" Start="11/07/2011 3:00AM" End="11/07/2011 4:00AM"/>
                    <scheduleView:Appointment Subject="Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol "
            Start="11/07/2011 6:00AM" End="11/07/2011 7:00AM"/>
                </scheduleView:ObservableAppointmentCollection>
            </telerik:RadScheduleView.AppointmentsSource>

            <telerik:RadScheduleView.ViewDefinitions>
                <telerik:DayViewDefinition/>
                <telerik:WeekViewDefinition/>
                <telerik:MonthViewDefinition/>
                <telerik:TimelineViewDefinition/>
            </telerik:RadScheduleView.ViewDefinitions>
        </telerik:RadScheduleView>

If the design-time surface does not auto-update right away, simply rebuild the project  so that the design-time can recreate the visible objects.

I hope this will be helpful.

Greetings,
Dani
the Telerik team