The story of human achievement is almost always one of teamwork. While we celebrate individual accomplishments, like Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon, it is always the team that makes or breaks the effort. I have always been interested in why teams succeed; it is easy to figure out why teams fail. A lot of time we think that we need a team of “Ninjas” in order to succeed, or a superstar team leader. In reality we need neither the Ninja team nor rock star team leader. For better or worse, I have been leading teams for a long time and I maybe a decent...

  We have been asked many times about the performance of our RadControls for Silverlight. We completely understand that “performance” is a key evaluation factor that makes users decide whether to go with a certain product or not. We also know that it is not only the fast performance that turns you, it is also a combination of several key factors, like Feature-set, Slick UI, Better User Experience, Rich API, etc. We have always tried to deliver all these in the best way so that as a result our controls keep on performing extremely fast and at the same time...

Starting with the Q1 2010 release we’ll be building against .NET 3.5 SP1. This is a new requirement and older releases are still compatible with .NET 3.5 RTM. There is no change in the requirements for the .NET 2.0 builds. Generally speaking, there is no reason why you shouldn’t install .NET 3.5 SP1 on your servers and workstations since this is the current official version of the framework. The reason for this requirement is that we’ll start shipping official .NET 4.0 builds of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX when VS 2010/.NET 4 RTM comes out. The service pack is a prerequisite for using the 4.0...

Using OpenAccess Forward Mapping really allows you to focus on building a strong model, rather than getting caught up in the persistence details, and this can expedite development time dramatically. Every developer I know could use a little more time to focus on more important things :) Before we can use the OpenAccess Forward Mapping Wizard, we need to create a model for our application.  After we have a solid model, we can run the wizard, and it will create the database for us! Awesome!   Getting Started The first thing that I do is create an abstract base class that all business...

After working a bit with the Silverlight Report Viewer for Telerik Reporting, it seemed only natural to write a quick post to explain how exactly the Reporting WCF Service (located here in the help file) works and how to quickly and easily get started with it. To start with, why do we need a WCF service for Telerik Reporting?  The answer is that we added a Silverlight Report viewer not too long ago, and in order to get information to a Silverlight client application you need to either use a javascript bridge through the webpage hosting the XAP, which is a slightly clunky...