Today we finally drew the lucky winner of the Trivia Game Show that was held at the telerik booth during the Expo hours at PDC 2005 in Los Angeles. The winner of the top prize - the  very desirable XBOX 360 - is Laijun Xie with Thomson Financial. We have pre-ordered the XBOX 360 on Amazon and the console should arrive via courier somewhere in December, perhaps just in time for Xmas:) Coming to think of it, I should also ask Santa for one. I am still playing Super Mario Bros on my Nintendo 1988 box but the XBOX 360 looks like a good...

I have just returned from Microsoft PDC 2005, and I must say that it was marvelous.  Being there was worth every miserable second on those flights :). The hottest thing for me was the new AJAX framework for ASP.NET -- Atlas.  Shanku Niyogi gave an overview session on Atlas that covered the potential uses of the framework.  Nikhil Kothari continued with a session on building Atlas components with server and client side examples.  Nikhil has posted an overview of the framework architecture on his blog.  You can download the slides of Shanku's presentation here, and Nikhil's -- here. I found it a bit odd at first that some...

We have a fairly automated builds at telerik.  You keep everything in VSS, and the moment you need a build, you just check-in your latest changes and launch the build script.  The build runs on our integration machine and produces the final deliverables. Now the build might take some time for a few of the products (I wish VSS was not so darn slow!).  I get the build results and the log of the NAnt scripts by email, but sometimes that is not fast enough.  The answer to my problems came when I switched to Miranda as my IM client.  Miranda has a lovely...

Sometimes you have a simple page with some web controls on it.  You would like to have a simple way to make sure that the text of a status message is exactly the one you expect.  Well, it turns out that the .NET class library has a real gem that can help you.  The System.Net.WebClient class helps you request pages, post data, upload files with a simple interface.  Getting the page contents is easy: [Test]public void GetPage(){   WebClient client = new WebClient();   using (Stream dataStream = client.OpenRead(pageAddress))   {      XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();      document.Load(dataStream);       XmlNode label = document.SelectSingleNode("//label[@id='nameLabel']");      Assert.AreEqual("Name:", label.InnerText);   }} I have taken some extra care to return valid XML,...

 Guess what, seems like we will be making our debut at an industry event. Up until now we have only been visitors at VS Live, ASP Connections, TechEd, etc. but as a PDC sponsor we decided that it's time we be amongst exhibitors. It's a great opportunity for us to meet with all telerik customers and partners. If you are attending PDC, make sure you stop by booth #423. We'd love to meet you guys and break out of the "virtual" relationship we have with most of you. We've also got some nice surprises for those of you who stop by:)...