Day 4
"eEnter your email ..."
but you can't enter the @ character?!
A joke or a bug (or a feature)?

best regards
stefan wolf

I inherited an ASP.NET application from a former developer who is now gone.  He had purchased a license but had not promoted the application to production.  Now that we are ready to move to production we get the error:

".a.d.tabstrip 3.2.2. You have not provided a valid license key or company, or you are trying to access the control by domain name, IP, or server name. Please, use http://localhost instead or obtain a 30-day trial key "

What is the best way of fixing this error?  We do not have the specific license information as far as we know.  We have  a licensefile.xml file with the application and libraries but cannot configure these properly on the server.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,
cj

It's Easter Sunday and it's snowing; so no gardening for me. The dopey UK SUnday trading laws also mean that all the shops are shut and, because the TV companies all have the closest to a captive audience that they're ever going to get, there's nothing on the TV.

Being the slightly sad muppet that I am, I thought I'd make some notes about the project I've been working on and how RadControls featured in it.

The project itself is one that's been running for a while and I don't intend to bore you with all of the details, but here's a quick summary. My company writes software for the property management market. The software has been in the market place since the 70s, so, as you can imagine, there is a lot of knowledge and expertise built in. The company has decided to make this knowledge available via the web and that's were I came in. The project has a number of modules, each one containing many forms for various functions and a LARGE number of reports. When looking at how to get all of this functionality on to a web-enabled platform, the company had the option of rewriting/modifying all of the forms/reports to work with a thin-client. This, ideal, solution was simply not practicable 'cos of the hugh cost in time and resources. Another option was to find a way of getting the output that the existing routines generated to be used to generate something that could be used in a browser.

As we're primarily interested in the way RadControls were used in the project, I'll concentrate now on the forms that the application uses. A decision was taken to keep things as simple as possible wrt form layout; in days past - certainly in the 'old' days of DOS-based systems with 80x25 screens - a huge amount of effort was made to get as much out of the usable screen space as possible. In these, more modern, days, people are used to scrolling forms - especially on the internet - so it was decided that layout should happen automagically, with a each 'line' on the for representing an input and each input appear below its predecessor.

We then had to thing about what type of inputs we needed and how to get them from the backend to the browser. Dealing with the latter item first, it'll come as no surprise to learn that we decided to describe the form and its inputs as XML, especially as this information was to be transmitted to the web application via a Web Service. The input types were, for the most part, the sort of thing that you would find in any application, numbers, strings and dates. Additionally we had choices based upon either database look-ups or programmer-supplied lists.

Designing the input controls to be used involved an amount of work based on requirements related to or driven by the specific nature of our application's environment and are of little interest in of themselves but how the issues raised were solved may be of interest to one or 2 of you, so I'll detail them each in their own post following this one.

Before I get on to that though, I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of the team at telerik towers how have yet to be fazed by some of my more stupid sounding questions. Thanks guys, this app would have taken much longer to get to this point than it did if it wasn't for your help, support and insight.

Hi,

I have about 40 screens in a vb.net application that require someone with expert experience in Telerik web controls, to port over. We are looking to do this in a short time span and are willing to incentive this for early completion.

The existing app is vb.net, sql server 2000 back end, and utilizes Obout's ajax components. If you are not familar with Obout, their approach ends up requiring a developer to write a boat load of javascript to wire up events and perform callbacks. The screens work (for the most part) so whoever takes this on has a working model for functionality.

We ended up abandoning Obout due to a variety of issues and are now looking to expunge all references to their code. Developers who reply and accept will be asked to sign a non-disclosure and confidentiality agreement as you will end up having access to our technologies, screens, etc. Thanks.

Details for the Q1 2008 Preview are available in this forum thread.

Online demos are available at:
http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/prometheus-futures

We will appreciate your feedback on the latest developments.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Telerik Team

What we really need urgently is a decent frontend coder who has extensive perl/catalyst/DBIx::Class experience paired with decent knowledge of the client side js/ajax framework dojo/dijit AKA We are looking for experienced developer to support our team, already built of 6 Perl developers, preferably full time. The primarily goal of the project is building server-side solutions for web-based portals. Perl/DBI is a must, AJAX is a good-to-have solution. 90% of the work is to be done from Budapest, with some traveling to Vienna. Please be preparred moving to Budapest in case of applying. We're happy to assist you in relocation, accommodation, etc.

Frontend developer: - good CSS - good AJAX - Tempalte.pm (optional) - Google maps api (optinal) Backend developer: - good in perl - familiar with MVC model (Catalyst - optional) - DBIx::Class (optional) - Template.pm (optional) ability to work independently, in a team fitting into a startup environment, enthusiasm about the job.

Catalyst Google maps API good command of English extensive perl/catalyst/DBIx::Class experience decent web frontend coder with js/ajax framework dojo/dijit.  Contact and information: Balazs Benedek InfomatiX Ltd. bbenedek@infomatix.hu +36309722556 Skype: balazsbenedek

How to set RadControlsDir property common for entire project.

The Ajax Alliance site is a repository for resources concerning : Rich Interface Applications: Ajax, Flex, Flash, Air, Java Server Faces, Silverlight and other related technologies. The content consists of articles, news, press releases, quotations, books reviews and links to articles, Web sites, tools, blogs, conferences and other elements concerning RIA.

http://www.ajaxalliance.org/

It is our greatest pleasure to announce the first beta of RadControls for WinForms Q1 2008!
 
This early Q1 2008 preview includes an appetizer of the anticipated major overhaul of RadGridView for WinForms as well as a new major version of RadMaskedEditBox and extended RTL language support. Q1 2008, when officially released in April, will also introduce a couple of new controls and several new versions of the current WinForms controls, which are not part of the current beta. 

RadGridView

Our extensive research on the new RadGridView version started back in October 2007 and focused exclusively on the needs of our customers, namely better usability and top-notch performance, and revealed several areas that needed our attention:

• UI and painting improvements, based on the Telerik Presentation Framework (TPF)
• Performance improvements in the data layer
• Performance improvements in the data <-> UI communication
• Stability and simpler API

The great news is that RadGridView’s performance has been optimized dramatically and the results are more than impressive*:

• Based on the “high refresh” performance test with 13 rows x 13 columns, the new data layer offers outstanding refresh performance with flat data: 2-3 ms (vs. 460ms in Q3 2007!) 
• Average time for loading 300,000 records of data: ~ 340 ms 
• Average time for grouping 300,000 records: ~ 100 ms 

* Tested on a WinXP machine, 2GB RAM, Intel Core 2 @ 2.13GHz (just one core utilized during the tests)

Usability has also been greatly improved, and the API simplified.

There are several features which we left for a subsequent beta. We will suggest reviewing the list of Known Issues and the Backwards Compatibility log before using the RadGridView beta in production. You can download the docs below.

RadMaskedEditBox

The Q1 2008 beta also features a fully functional preview of the new major version of RadMaskedEditBox. It adds a new Numeric MaskType which allows the user to set culture-specific masks for inputting currency, decimal, and percent values.

RTL Language Support

We have added RTL Language support in RadDateTimePicker , RadPanelBar and RadScrollBar.

Download

You can test the Q1 2008 beta first-hand by downloading the trial version from here (right-click and select Save As):

 Build: RadControls for WinForms Q1 2008 Beta (trial) installer
 Docs: Known Issues and Backwards Comapatibility
 Help: RadControls_for_WinForms_Help_Q1_2008_Beta.zip
    (new versions of the help files will be posted as soon as they become available)

You can use the public WinForms Beta Forum to share your feedback and comments. Our developers will be addressing all questions posted.


The Telerik Team