Falafel Software is happy to announce that we’ve recently published a new tool for importing lists of email addresses directly into Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS. If you’re looking to leverage Sitefinity’s built-in Newsletter capabilities but your customer list isn’t already there this tool can get going quickly. Easily import CSV files directly into your Sitefinity database and start sending Newsletters through Sitefinity’s rich CMS capabilities.

For more details checkout our video on using the tool available from the Sitefinity Marketplace here and from our store here for $29.95.

A quick example of what will and won't work to cast a generic parameter to a concrete type

Does RIA deliver on the promise of simplified LOB development?

I don’t like the diff/merge tool that comes with TFS. At all. It isn’t just that it’s feature-poor; it also isn’t good at the one thing it’s supposed to do. I’ve had a quite a few merge operations go horribly wrong, resulting in data loss and syntactically incorrect merge results. Today I found two excellent articles that described how to replace the default TFS diff/merge with an alternative one:

TFS: Using Alternative Diff/Merge Tools

diff/merge configuration in Team Foundation - common Command and Argument values

There are a lot of alternatives out there. I chose to use KDiff3 because it is both free and popular. Most of the other alternatives are either one (Beyond Compare is very popular but not free) or the other (SourceGear DiffMerge is free and looks very good but is not as well-known).

When choosing an alternative, make sure that you choose one that supports 3-way merges. They are much more accurate and reliable than 2-way merges. Of the options listed in the articles above, that means to rule out WinMerge and Beyond Compare prior to version 3.

Telerik’s ComboboxColumn for the Silverlight RadGrid is highly useful for presenting drop-down list options for the user in a grid-editing scenario. But it’s also very easy to template, and you can even template the ‘Display’ look of the cells to match that of your dropdown list items. Using templates, we have the ability to display the dropdown choices using data-driven visual elements, for a much richer user experience.