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  • Productivity

    Understanding Where to Set Connection Strings in OpenAccess

    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:...
    May 27, 2021 4 min read
  • Desktop WPF

    WPF: Customizing the chart series appearance in RadChart

    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...
    May 27, 2021 3 min read
  • Productivity

    Saving a few lines of code. Part III - The power of monads

    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")...
    May 27, 2021 1 min read
  • People

    Happy New Year to Everybody!

    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...
    May 27, 2021 2 min read
  • Web

    Marketing and Silverlight, configuring cross-domain banners

    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....
    May 27, 2021 3 min read
  • Desktop WPF

    Putting Instructional Prompts in Controls

    When asking the user to provide input in any application it can help to give them guidance on what you are expecting.  There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, but one in particular seems to be very effective.  If you have ever used Microsoft PowerPoint you will undoubtedly have seen a screen similar to the graphic below. The instructional prompt effectively conveys to the user where to type a title and subtitle for the slide.  Better yet, the user can ignore these prompts and proceed with other activities in the application.  Live Search Map provides another example of...
    May 27, 2021 2 min read
  • Productivity Testing

    A Vote for Extensibility in Test Automation Solutions

    I hope I haven’t confused anyone mentioning the weak points of test automation in my previous post. The gained experience however indicates the importance of looking into test automation based on straight-forward and easily maintained solutions. That’s a problem people have been trying to solve for more then a decade now. In the current post I’d like to get your attention to a key of successful test automation via using the tools extensibility. Nowadays there are plenty of test automation solutions especially for the well-known platforms like ASP.NET Web. Should you consider automate your testing activities, you will probably ...
    May 27, 2021 3 min read
  • Productivity

    Visual Studio: “Error Creating Control”

    I’ve run into this error before and last night it reared its ugly head again. You’ll find it from time to time when switching to Design View in Visual Studio to work with custom server controls. The bug is in Service Pack 1 of VS and can be quite annoying.   It has been submitted to Microsoft and they claim to be working on a solution which will “fix it in subsequent releases” of Visual Studio. Unfortunately, developers (like me) don’t want their productivity to suffer while we all wait for a fix from Microsoft. So here are a couple of steps...
    May 27, 2021 1 min read
  • Release

    Want to help us build better Silverlight controls?

    We started a survey to gain your mostly valuable feedback on your experience and expectations with the Silverlight platform and the controls we provide. Your involvement will be much appreciated and you will be awarded 1000 Telerik points for taking the survey. We want to direct our future Silverlight development into building the critical and most important blocks for your existing or future Silverlight applications. You can take the survey at: Silverlight Survey
    May 27, 2021 1 min read
  • People

    Conferences?

    I was thinking about how professional conferences and the accompanying them trade shows are a great place for networking, finding out what’s hot in the industry and learning from the leading experts in the field.  I still believe that conferences are very useful  but I am starting to have some second thoughts about the tradeshows. Considering the myriad of online communication recourses available to companies for interacting with their customers and the community, and the global economy crisis, 2009 will be an interesting year. I decided to post this to see if you have any opinion on the subject. I think it will be interesting...
    May 27, 2021 1 min read