So, the promise of RIA and the Entity Framework is to make common Line of Business Application development simpler, right? Yet there is an incredibly basic scenario that has me stumped – am I alone here in having an application with lookup fields like State or Gender? Here is the setup:

We have rows of data (County entities) that reference another entity (States). These are both in our Entity Framework model. I.e the State is a lookup table for county (it could just as well be a gender table for a person, or some other lookup table relationship). ...

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 ...

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.

Here’s an example of using a simple template that utilizes a custom Background and Foreground color, based upon properties of the underlying data.  First, a look at the sample data used for ...

And for the general public, on Wednesday Feb 10th.

One caveat (and a huge one, if you ask me) is that this version only supports Silverlight 3, not the current Silverlight 4 beta. If you are developing Silverlight 4, you need to stick with the November 2009 Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. See more information in this blog.

Lino Tadros, CEO of Falafel Software, recently participated in an SD Times interview, see the full text here. The interview focuses on the ever increasing pace of software and component evolution, and how component vendors like Telerik and software consultants like Falafel can harness that to bring value to their customers.