When you start working with OpenAccess, one of the first tasks you're going to face is the need set a connection string to your database. And odds are, the connection string you're going to start with is not going to be the connection string your going to use on your production server. It might not even be the connection string your going to use in your test environment. Point is, you need to be able to store multiple connection strings and easily "cue" OpenAccess to use the correct connection details at runtime. Fortunately, OpenAccess makes this easy.   UNDERSTANDING OPENACCESS CONNECTIONS First things first:...

RadChart comes with a versatile collection of preset themes (Summer, Vista, Office). At times you may wish to use one of the predefined themes but customize its appearance a bit to fit your specific scenario / application and the control provides easy mechanism to achieve the desired effect. RadChart uses the concept of style palettes in order to style the various chart series. There are distinct style palettes for the various series types (Line, Bar, Pie, etc.) and each palette can contain as many style elements as you want -- the first style is applied to the first chart series of...

I won't go into detail about how you could use the maybe monad to save a few lines of code as Daniel Earwicker already blogged about it so you'd better read his post. Basically using the IfNotNull extension method you'll be able to replace lines of code like these: string[] url = SplitUrl(urlString); RecordCompany company = Music.GetCompany("4ad.com");     if (company != null)   {       Band band = company.GetBand("Pixies");       if (band != null)       {           Member member = band.GetMember("David");             if (member != null)               return member.Role;       }   }   return null;    with the following: return Music.GetCompany("4ad.com")...

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...

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....