As solutions get more complicated every day so does the domain model. Navigating in the designer can become quite frustrating if you have a rather large database with 100+ tables. There is however a light at the end of the tunnel.  There are a few often overlooked features of the designer that can make your life easier when dealing with large models.  First of all you should get familiar with search bar on top of the Model Explorer and the Schema Explorer. It is the easiest way to find a class or a table by its name. So what do you do...

Personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types of a system. Personas will help you visualize the people behind the keyboard using the features of the software your team is creating. You will can describe exactly how personas use your software by describing the interaction in a story. When defining software requirements in the context of a persona (complete with a picture, a name, and a rich description of a personas goals, objectives, constraints, and day to day realities) teams can better define how to approach the design of the features the persona interacts with. TeamPulse provides ...

[Cross-posted from TelerikWatch.com] Sometimes people use the saying “Everyone’s a winner,” when in fact everyone is not a winner. If you join us tomorrow for the JustCode, JustMock and OpenAccess ORM webinar, though, you will be a winner! Everyone is truly a winner tomorrow because everyone that attends the Q2 2010 What’s New webinar will get free licenses for both JustCode and JustMock, Telerik’s powerful Visual Studio productivity tools. That’s $500 worth of software just for attending the live webinar event! To get your complimentary licenses, register now for the webinar, and then join us tomorrow, July 22nd at 11:00 AM Eastern. You must attend the...

In this blog post we will introduce the new intuitive and powerful Fetch Optimization API. Users familiar with the LINQ to SQL data load options will feel very comfortable with our API. If you don’t have a clue what this is all about, here we will give an overview of the basic concepts behind the usage of fetch strategies. In short, fetch strategies help you optimize your retrieval of objects from the database. They allow you to specify properties in a persistent object that are retrieved together whenever you invoke a call to the persistent object. Let’s consider the following example...

Introducing RadRichtextBoxRibbonUI Some of you may have noticed that along with the official release of RadRichTextBox for Silverlight 4 we introduced a new control to our suite – RadRichTextBoxRibbonUI. Now we want to get your attention and share with you some more details about the new control. Its main purpose is to allow you to get a full featured editing UI for RadRichTextBox out-of-the-box with just one click. The whole process will take few seconds while you drag the control from the toolbox and drop it in the design surface. After that all the XAML will be generated automatically for you...