Control Designers for JavaScript Widgets in Sitefinity

Posted by: on | Friday, May 31, 2013     Comments

We are excited to introduce a new feature in Falafel Tornado: control designers for your HTML5 / JavaScript widgets!! Take a fresh look at the control properties for widget blocks:


There's a lot more going on here than meets the eye. You still select the HTML5 / JavaScript widget to use as before, but what's interesting is that you now get a whole bunch of other selectors. These selectors will feed the property values to your widget block to consume!

For example, say you have an image carousel. It needs an album ID right? That way, it can ...

Telerik Tools Helped Deliver EventBoard on Time

Posted by: on | Wednesday, February 27, 2013     Comments

Building our EventBoard mobile solution for conferences was no easy task. The solution includes native applications for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8, Windows Azure cloud services, a web based administration portal, and a separate product website.

Thankfully, we were able to use the tools from Telerik in nearly every facet of development. The tools saved us time and money, and now Telerik has featured our development story in a detailed case study. You can read all about what it took to build EventBoard here.

Falafel Strengthens Sitefinity Team

Posted by: on | Sunday, February 17, 2013     Comments

Capitola CA - 18th February, 2013 - Today Falafel Software is pleased to announce that two additional Sitefinity experts are joining the team: Jochem Bökkers and Josh Morales. Jochem and Josh are two of the most respected names in the Sitefinity development community and each brings in-depth Sitefinity knowledge and their own unique technical expertise to the Falafel family.

“It is a pleasure and an honor to add two established software engineers to the Falafel family.” said Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO of Falafel Software. “Josh and Jochem are hard core Sitefinity architects that will be a tremendous help to ...

Falafel Software Announces FalafelCon

Posted by: on | Tuesday, January 29, 2013     Comments

Falafel Software is pleased to announce FalafelCon 2013, the new annual training conference for software developers.

Capitola CA - 29th January, 2013 - Falafel Software’s new annual training conference, FalafelCon, will take place at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus on June 10 and 11th, offering software developers four co-located events and 40 technical sessions to choose from.

FalafelCon’s four co-located events include Web and Mobile specific events that explore cutting edge software development techniques with Microsoft development tools. Advanced development topics include Azure tips and tricks, cross platform mobile development, NFC with Windows Phone, Windows 8 sensor integration and ...

Falafel Bugs for Windows 8 Released

Posted by: on | Thursday, January 17, 2013     Comments

We take quality seriously. Up until now, if you said the word “bug” in the halls of Falafel Software, you had better be whispering.

So just imagine how much fun it was to build an app that was full of bugs. Of course, we’re not talking about programming bugs, but the kind of bugs that can scurry all over your screen and give anyone looking over your shoulder the creeps.

This new Windows 8 app wasn’t just for fun either, this bug invasion is smart. You can set the size of the swarm and these intelligent little creatures can tell ...

Kendo UI for Web Designers… and client side programmers and server side programmers

Posted by: on | Thursday, November 01, 2012     Comments

Telerik's Kendo UI controls are efficient, client-side controls for web pages that are built on top of JavaScript/jQuery. The control suite includes all the usual suspects, i.e. grid, calendar, drop down lists, navigation controls (tab strip, panel bar, menu), tree views and windows. You may be a web designer, JavaScript/jQuery programmer or perhaps happier programming on the server-side. Stay tuned, because each development style has its own approach for creating Kendo UI controls.

Web Designers

Let's say you have a web page with existing content. You'd like to use Kendo UI controls in place of the HTML but don't want to dive ...

A Salute to the Falafel Rock Stars

Posted by: on | Friday, October 05, 2012     Comments

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 ...

Adding Your Own Scripts and Style Sheets to MVC 4 Bundles

Posted by: on | Wednesday, September 19, 2012     Comments

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 ...

Lino Tadros to Speak at Sitefinity and Beyond

Posted by: on | Wednesday, August 15, 2012     Comments

To Sitefinity and Beyond! That’s where you’ll find Falafel Software CEO Lino Tadros sharing his Sitefinity knowledge and experience. Lino will join the Sitefinity team at the event to help educate and guide the community on Sitefinity development and best practices. His talk, “Deploying High Performing and Scalable Web Solutions” draws from the experience of developing over 150 Sitefinity solutions and will explain exactly how to optimize Sitefinity for the demands of the enterprise. You’ll learn how to configure IIS, properly cache data, eliminate ViewState, pre-compile sites, optimize JavaScript, use single sign on, load balance mutliple sites ...

Learn the Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1

Posted by: on | Tuesday, August 07, 2012     Comments

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 ...

Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1

Posted by: on | Thursday, July 19, 2012     Comments

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....

MVC Comes to Sitefinity 5.1!

Posted by: on | Tuesday, July 17, 2012     Comments

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 ...

Exceed Expectations with Sitefinity 5.1 and Falafel Software

Posted by: on | Monday, July 16, 2012     Comments

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 ...

Learn JavaScript With New Book From Falafel Software

Posted by: on | Friday, July 06, 2012     Comments

JavaScript has been turning up everywhere. With nearly every desktop and mobile web browser on the planet coming equipped with a JavaScript engine, the language has become the de facto standard for client side code. There is just no better way to guarantee your audience can access the full feature set of your application.

Although JavaScript has typically been regarded as a client side technology, in-roads have been made in other areas in recent years. Frameworks like node.js are powering major server side applications and JavaScript can even be found querying some of the major NoSQL databases.

Here at Falafel ...

Telerik shows the power of Kendo UI and HTML5 at Google I/O

Posted by: on | Tuesday, July 03, 2012     Comments

Our good friends at Telerik were invited to show off Kendo UI in the exclusive Google Developer Sandbox at Google I/O 2012. At Falafel Software, we were especially excited about one of Telerik’s demonstrations; a web-based photo booth application that leverages Kendo UI and new cutting edge HTML5 features available in Google’s updated Chrome browser, codenamed “Canary”.  This web application uses the Media Source API and other early stage HTML5 elements to access your webcam, analyze a constant stream of video data to detect and track multiple faces, overlay a number of props and effects (think funhouse mirrors, ...

Kendo UI Custom DataSource Filtering

Posted by: on | Thursday, June 28, 2012     Comments

I've enjoyed the chance to use Kendo UI over the last few weeks.  The UI Widgets are powerful and save a lot of development time.  And often when I find myself saying, "it would be great if I could. . ." it is already part of the product.

Many of the widgets make use of the DataSource component which has a built-in filter method.  This allows you to use operators such as "equal to" or "contains" to filter the data in your DataSource.  One of the less-documented capabilities of the DataSource filter is the ability to do custom filtering....

Congratulations to NimblePros and Telerik!

Posted by: on | Thursday, April 26, 2012     Comments

On April 25th 2012, Telerik announced the acquisition of their first Enterprise level Service company, NimblePros.  The press release can be read here.

We are very excited for our friends at NimblePros and Telerik and wish to congratulate them and wish them well on

this initiative to increase the level of in-house support for Telerik’s enterprise level customers.

 

With the tremendous success Telerik has been enjoying worldwide and phenomenal growth, selling the products was not enough for major Fortune 500 companies everywhere that require a solid commitment and hand holding for architecture advice as well as implementation ...

Falafel Releases Sitefinity 5 Nuts & Bolts

Posted by: on | Tuesday, April 17, 2012     Comments

Today, Falafel Software, the premier Consulting & Training company for Sitefinity worldwide, released a new version of its book “Sitefinity 5 Nuts & Bolts”.

 

The book is released for FREE for ALL of our current Sitefinity 4 Nuts & Bolts’ customers.  Just log into your account and download the new 5.0 book.
For all new customers purchasing the new Sitefinity 5.0 book, you will receive the 4.0 book as well plus all the source code for all the samples, modules and widgets.

Get your copy today and start enjoying the new Sitefinity 5 product while discovering many many new ...

Telerik Report Designer

Posted by: on | Wednesday, March 28, 2012     Comments

Users in the Telerik Reporting Forums have been clamoring for a Stand-Alone Report Designer for a long time now. I’ve been working with Telerik Reporting for the past few years, which means I have spent my share of time researching issues in the forum. I have seen several posts by users asking for a Report Designer that doesn’t require Visual Studio. With the 2012 Q1 release of Telerik Reporting it is finally here.

The Telerik Report Designer allows a non-developer/report designer to have a separate tool to start working with the Telerik reports. This will free your developers up to ...

Sitefinity 5 and REST APIs

Posted by: on | Wednesday, March 07, 2012     Comments

We were very excited last week with the release of Sitefinity 5.  It has been running fast and solid on several machines (servers) here at Falafel Software.

One blemish though was the major breaking change to the authentication of the REST APIs.  If you are upgrading from a 4.x site to 5.0, no worry that change will not affect you (not right away at least), but if you are setting up a brand new Sitefinity 5 Web Application, the default authentication has changed from FORMS authentication to CLAIMS authentication which will break any code previously written using the REST API ...