We have taken quite an adventure in chronicling the new Silverlight CRM demo and all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making new demos for our site, but now we finally get to talk about the really fun stuff – UI. I know, I know, depending on what hat you are wearing at your company you may be thinking “Hey, I loved the previous posts on MEF (here and here) as well as what you were saying about the Repository Pattern, what’s all this UI business?” As it turns out, Telerik sells a wide range of UI components that are used...
This is part three of the RadChart for WinRT blog series. For more information please refer to the other parts of the series: Part one - A Prelude Part two - The Compilation Okay, we have already compiled our Windows Phone Chart under WinRT (refer to the previous post). The whole process went pretty straightforward and took less than an hour. Now, let’s move on with setting-up a demo project with a simple chart in it to verify the compilation and to check for some hidden exceptions. The steps are well familiar: File->New Project->Visual C#->Windows Metro Style->Application. Adding the reference to our freshly compiled...
While helping with the development of our Tasks application I stumbled upon a strange compiler error. There was a lambda expression that was compiling just fine before I touched the file with the lambda and after changing a line inside the body of the lambda, the project suddenly stopped compiling. The error was, that it could not find an adequate overload of the method that accepted the lambda in question as an argument. The cause turned out to be very interesting(for me at least) and I think it is worth sharing. Consider that you have a function with two overloads that both accept...
Q3 2011 release is getting close and we are eager to share some of the improvements that we have been working on lately. We have always been relying on your feedback to better shape our tools for your purposes. This time it is no different. RadPropertyGrid will get three highly requested features. The first feature will allow you to add custom items in the RadPropertyGrid by using RadPropertyStore. It is a collection of PropertyStoreItems which contain information that describes a property, its type, name, value, etc. When the RadPropertyStore is set to the SelectedObject property of the RadPropertyGrid, it displays these...
Back in late August/early September I spoke at the Rocky Mountain Ruby conference in Boulder, Colorado. My talk was about lessons learned dealing with large functional test suites over my career. For example, at a previous job I ran a team that got up to 9,000 Selenium tests scattered across roughly 850 test fixtures. I’ve had similar experiences working on other projects too. The talk was videotaped and is now up on the Confreaks video hosting site: Surviving Growing from Zero to 15,000 Selenium Tests. Yes, the talk’s title is wrong. I goofed when submitting it. The fundamentals I ...
A lot of people have posted tributes to Steve Jobs over the past week. I’ve seen him
called the CEO of
the Decade (something I agree with) and also
compared to Henry Ford (I sort of agree with). I’d like to call attention to four
lessons we can learn from Steve Jobs’ Apple, two positive and two negative. First
the good:
Apple avoided falling into the trap of the Innovator’s Dilemma
Apple avoided falling into the trap of the Innovator’s
Dilemma. In a nutshell, the Innovator’s Dilemma says the following (I am paraphrasing):
when you invent something, first you are trying to penetrate a new market and convince
people to buy your...
While working up a blog post today on creating a simple game with HTML5, I tested the app on my iPhone and found something quite interesting. It was ridiculously slow. You can check out the application here and see it’s performance on your mobile device. It appears to...
I’m at the John Wayne airport waiting on my flight back home from the StarWest conference. This was the first conference I’ve been at as a vendor – I’ve always been a visitor at the front of the booth, never behind it. I had to make some interesting mental changes, but it was a great experience once I got in the groove. Thursday morning I did a session called “Automation Isn’t Just Shiny Toys” where I discussed how to avoid some of the common pitfalls around automation: long running tests, brittle tests, tests which consume far too much time for ...
We introduced RadBulletGraph beta in the Q2 2011 SP1 release with the idea that the sooner we release a stable product the more time we will have to polish it and even implement user requirements before the final version. With this blog post I will explain how RadBulletGraph is structured internally and how this internal structure enables the features that it currently supports. With this in mind I kindly ask you, dear reader, to give your opinion on RadBulletGraph, to tell us what else you need or what can be done in a better way so that we can provide the best...
This is part two of the RadChart for WinRT blog series. For more information please refer to the other parts of the series: Part one - A Prelude Part three - Taking its First Breath Now that we have successfully ported our Windows Phone Chart to WinRT I will share some tips and tricks about the whole process and what is different compared to Silverlight and WPF regarding code behind and XAML compilation. Code behind namespaces Both logical and visual tree hierarchies of Dependency Objects now reside in new namespaces and the old ones like System.Windows.Controls do not exist. This automatically breaks any existing C#/VB code. SL/WPF UI namespaces...