Now that Linq-to-SQL is not going to be developed any more, it seems developers are left with little choice as to what ORM to use for their next projects. The ADO.NET Entity Framework seems to have become the ORM of choice for most Microsoft developers, who want to address the impedance mismatch across various data representations, but although very good and quite powerful, it falls short on some important characteristics of modern-day development: Visual Mapper/Entity Designer with advanced capabilities; Lack of native support for databases different from SQL Server; Release cycle of 2-4 years; Advanced/dedicated technical support; No built-in caching layer; We are sure that code-first...

1st click, 2nd click and you are ready to go. These are the steps required to install any Telerik product as of the Q1 2011 release. The idea behind this change is to provide better user experience during installation. To achieve this we have minimized the steps that you have to perform when installing any Telerik product while at the same time we have left the same flexibility to customize what is installed. Let me introduce the new installation workflow: Step 1 On the first dialog you can read the license agreement of the product if you click the Read License Agreement button. By continuing...

As you have probably heard starting with the official Q1 2011 release our AJAX components will provide integrated VS 2010 MSHelp3 documentation. Since the release a couple of customers have reported that they are not able to install the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. It turned out that the problem was related to the deployment of the MS Help 3 documentation. As a result we identified two different reasons for the failure. Both are described in the current blog post. First I want to show you how to recognize installation failure caused by the documentation deployment. To do so you have to examine the Application...

As developers, we like to believe that only raw data matters. And what is more raw than the written word? Does this mean that email is a more efficient communication mechanism than in-person meetings? Email contains just the raw words of our intent, right? The receiver can scan through looking for relevant content. Their computer can index and search our email. Why don’t we communicate everything in email? We’ve all experienced the miscommunication that can happen in email. So what are we missing? The reality is that humans are social animals. We are attuned to many communication side channels - ...

As existing users might have experienced , handling the identity of a persistent object in OpenAccess can get complicated at times especially when it comes to a type with composite identity fields. With an aim to simplifying this aspect we worked on the ObjectKey API to make it easier to comprehend and to use. This blog post describes the API in brief, it’s intended usage and how existing code can be migrated.   The ObjectKey The ‘ObjectKey’ is the new entry point for working with a persistent object’s identity. The ‘ObjectKey’ for a persistent object can be obtained form the runtime or if...