Over the holiday season, the engineering team open sourced the Dynamic LINQ Helpers to provide ASP.NET developers a simple way to handle communication between Kendo UI widgets and Entity Framework queries. This article looks at how to install and use the dynamic LINQ helpers in a variety of ASP.NET environments.

Anyone that has ever done a web search is familiar with autocomplete behavior. But actually developing these controls has a number of non-trivial technical challenges. Where do you get the options from? Do you specify those options on the client or load them server-side? Do you load all options at once or as the user types? Kendo UI's AutoComplete widget gives you the hooks to make all these implementations possible. In this article we'll build a few Java-backed AutoComplete widgets to explore the best way to structure the autocomplete controls you need to build. We'll start with a small hardcoded list, and scale all the way up a server filtered list with a million options.

I've used RequireJS a lot over the last 2+ years, and as I've been learning Kendo UI, I was curious how well the two could work together. Burke Holland has already written a bit on this topic as well, but I wanted to find out if I could use the "text" loader plugin for RequireJS to load Kendo templates from external files. It turns out, you can. There's just a slight twist in doing so.

With the Q3 2013 release of Kendo UI, we introduced a new Map control in the DataViz suite. With features like map markers, zoom, touch-based input, tile-based maps and GeoJSON, this control makes it easier than ever to add maps to your app, with compatibility all the way back to IE7! But The DataViz Map control does not provide it’s own map images for tiling or other layers - this is something that you have to provide through integration with tile-based map services. Fortunately, this is as easy as typing in a URL.

Form validation is like politics: It sounds like a simple problem to solve. It's not until you get involved that you discover what a nasty and convoluted business it is. Kendo UI can't solve all of the issues of politics, but it does have quite a few validation tricks up it's sleeve. Some widgets (like the Kendo UI Grid) have validation baked right in. The same framework that these widgets use is exposed for you to use as well.