Falafel Dashboard now available on NuGet

The Falafel Dashboard has been updated today with new widgets, and better still, is now easily downloadable via NuGet! This release brings a few new widgets as well as some new features that will hopefully help developers more easily develop and add their own widgets to the dashboard.

New Widgets: Error Logs and Recent Comments

The Dashboard now includes two brand new widgets to give you even more at-a-glance info on your dashboard.

The Error Logs widget reads all of the log files from your Sitefinity Logs folder and displays them in a ...

If you are like any other coder, cutting and pasting snippets should put up a red flag in your mind. You will quickly hit this threshold when creating CRUD-services for MVC 4 applications over and over again. This lead me to create a repository pattern using generic types and base controller classes that I would like to share with you. In the end, below is how my Web API classes look like, which automatically give me create, retrieve, update, and delete functionality:

Wow, I can't believe 2012 is gone already, not only that, but January of 2013 is over.  January has been a tremendous month for the company, the best January ever in the 10 years history of Falafel Software Inc.

We started the year very strong with multiple new accounts in the USA, Europe, Far East and Australia.

Sitefinity continues to be a very strong business for Falafel and we continue to assemble the best Engineering team in the industry to meet the consulting and architecture demands for our Sitefinity Business.  Great announcements coming soon!

SmartBear's relationship continues to flourish ...

The web users of today expect a modern experience that only a single page application can deliver. Page refreshes are a thing of the past. Waiting for anything longer than 2 seconds without a "cool effect" is not acceptable. Responsive design for tablets and smartphones should just work.

These demands of the new era have spawned new ways to develop JavaScript applications. For modern, scalable, and extensible JavaScript applications, two techniques are on the forefront: MVC patterns and AMD design. For this demo, we will be using RequireJS for AMD modular design and CanJS for MVC.

By the way, I ...

Every year, October kicks off a very busy season at Falafel : “Conference Season”. Multiple members of the team travel across the country and around world to share their expertise on a number of technologies. All Falafel Software team members spend their days, and often their nights, helping design and build cutting edge solutions for our customers. Their technical presentations draw from these real world experiences and are assembled, practiced, and presented in what little spare time they have. That’s why we call them “Rock Stars”.

This weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp, Falafel’s entire team from around the ...

So you have seen the light and ready to make the jump into ASP.NET MVC. But wait! You are not ready to migrate a million lines of code from your legacy Web Forms application? No problem. You can easily integrate MVC 4 into your existing Web Forms application and gradually phase out the legacy stuff over time.

There are many articles and blog posts about this topic. However, most are outdated or take the loooong way. I have a simple, clean solution for you! Here it goes:

1. Upgrade your Web Forms application to .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2012 if ...

Using Ajax.BeginForm in your MVC View gives you an easy way of doing a partial postback via an AJAX call.  In its simplest form, our view would look something like this:


The BeginForm method has several overloads which allow you to pass in ...

MVC 4 bundles and minifies scripts and style sheets for best performance.  This clean framework has some great selling points:

• Automatically uses minified versions when you're running in production but leaves everything uncompressed and easily readable when you're debugging.
• Reduces the markup needed to declare JavaScript and style files. Yet you can still control the order that files load in.
• Allows bundling by using wild cards and variables. This allows you to load all the "Kendo" JavaScript files, for example.

A new MVC 4 app will bundle scripts and styles for jQuery, Knockout and Modernizr automatically, but you can create ...

In this post, I would like to open your eyes to a new way of developing JavaScript applications. We will be building modular JavaScript code on an MVC architecture while also handling dependencies. With these techniques, you can join a new era of web development and stop coding like it's 1999!

Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD)

First, let us get some terminology out the way. The Asynchronous Module Definition, or AMD, is a mechanism for defining modules such that the module and its dependencies can be asynchronously loaded. In other words, JavaScript files and units of code can be loaded via ...

Did you know in Razor markup you can do this:

And it will get auto-resolved on render, such as:

Another welcomed gem in MVC 4 :)

Falafel Dashboard is a new state-of-the-art dashboard for Sitefinity MVC. Falafel Dashboard can be easily extended by the introduction of custom widgets for the Dashboard. In this column, we are going to create a “Hello World” widget and add it to the Dashboard.

 

The “Hello World” widget albeit very simple resembles the other widgets that are included out-of-the-box by being a standard Sitefinity MVC widget.

 

Let us start by creating the “Hello World” MVC widget:

 

The model:

Falafel just released a video explaining how the Dashboard works, how to install it, configure it and display it instead of the built in Sitefinity Dashboard.  The video is embedded below or you are welcome to view it on YouTube.

Get the Falafel DashBoard for Sitefinity MVC.

It is with great pleasure that we, at Falafel Software, introduce to you the Falafel Dashboard. 

With the latest release of Sitefinity 5.1, we were all treated to a great feature and a major change in the ability of the framework by introducing MVC in Sitefinity.

It was a clean and robust implementation that Falafel Software jumped on the opportunity and started to think about add-ons and plug-ins that will add value and benefit all Sitefinity content shareholders everywhere.

The current Dashboard in Sitefinity 4, 5 and 5.1 is pretty much a placeholder in our opinion.  It can show a ...

Sitefinity 5.1 was released a few weeks ago, bringing the flexibility and speed of ASP.NET MVC + Razor to Telerik’s award winning CMS. We’ve always been big fans of MVC and this new programming model has made it even easier to include JavaScript and use our favorite Kendo UI widgets on Sitefinity web sites.  

Anticipating the new Sitefinity release, we put together a Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1 Package that combined online training with hands on guidance from our consultants. The response was tremendous. We received many requests to break the package into two separate options and we were happy ...

With ASP.NET MVC Razor and the ability to easily leverage Kendo UI, Sitefinity 5.1 is the fastest and most flexible version of Sitefinity yet. At Falafel Software, we want to be sure you understand how to make the most of these new techniques and tools. Our Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1 Package will do just that. Part training class, part mentoring program, you’ll learn to bring all the tools together to build your first cutting edge Sitefinity 5.1 site with MVC Razor and Kendo UI. Then you’ll have your own personal consultant to help you build or update your Sitefinity projects....

Another teaser to show where we are going with all the possibilities with the new Falafel Dashboard for Sitefinity 5.1

Please feel free to comment here to request more features, input, must haves, etc…

 

We continue to be very excited about the new release of 5.1 and the world of possibilities it opened to build robust widgets and modules in MVC with the razor syntax

 

Update: To learn more, we're now offering an instructor-led Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1 class, where you'll learn how to use ASP.NET MVC + Razor, JavaScript and Kendo UI in Sitefinity 5.1. 

Sitefinity joins the MVC ranks with its 5.1 release and boy is it impressive. What makes it so unique is that Web Forms is still offered in the platform for developers to use as an alternative or hybrid approach. You heard that right, mix Web Form and MVC controls on the same page! Furthermore, with the MVC-only implementation, page templates are rendered as pure, unpolluted HTML pages. This is ...

Telerik is releasing Sitefinity 5.1, the most comprehensive update to Sitefinity since 4.0. This begs the question, are you ready to take advantage of all Sitefinity 5.1 has to offer? 

Telerik packed this new release full of great new features and enhancements. Developers will be delighted with the new technical enhancements that allow Sitefinity to be easily extended with ASP.NET MVC and Razor. Couple that with Telerik’s Kendo UI integration and you have the most flexible and speedy version of Sitefinity ever built. 

There is a lot for administrators to get excited about in Sitefinity 5.1 too. New features allow ...

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta includes ASP.NET Web API which makes it very easy to expose data through a REST API in either XML or JSON with very little code.  There are some great tutorials on the asp.net site to get up and running.  After working with MVC 4 for a while, I have discovered a few quirks, so hopefully these tips will save you some time.

XML and IEnumerable Properties

The MVC4 ApiController will automatically detect the request's Content-Type to see if it is expecting application/json or text/xml in the response.  One of my model classes had a collection ...

Update:  Find more of these tips and tricks in our Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1 class, where you'll learn how to use JavaScript, KendoUI and ASP.NET MVC + Razor in Telerik's Sitefinity CMS. Sign up for Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1.

 Creating a JavaScript application on top of ASP.NET MVC is becoming more common these days. Rightfully so, especially with the new Web API addition to MVC 4. The clear separation between client-side and server-side is an elegant architecture indeed!

Retrieving collections and objects from MVC is simply a matter of calling the REST URL via AJAX. The result will give you ...