Falafel Software created two videos on the pre-release version of MonoDroid in the last week with permission from the Mono Development Team at Novell in order to demonstrate the power of this upcoming tool in building Android Applications in Visual Studio 2010 using C#.   The first video was downloaded 12,000 times in the first 36 hours worldwide.  The interest is very high for this tool! What do you think of the ability to write C# code for the Android SDK?

I got some positive feedback on my recent post about binding a TextBlock’s tooltip to its own text property, so I decided to post this related follow-up…

 

Allowing your users to navigate your forms with the keyboard is a very important usability feature that is often overlooked.  In Silverlight, this is accomplished by setting IsTabStop to True on any controls you want to participate in keyboard navigation.  When the user hits the tab key, focus will cycle through all the controls where IsTabStop is True, one at a time.  Any controls where IsTabStop is false will be skipped....

I know, you are probably thinking “Batch files? What is this, the Dark Age of DOS?” Bear with me; while you might see batch files as antiquated relics, I have come to see them as simple and elegant tools (with admittedly primitive syntax) that speed my daily development. They seem to have become a bit of a lost art in this day and age of point-and-click UIs. Let me share a few scenarios with you.

Delete log files before running an app

This one is simple. I am on a team developing a large WCF multi-tier application with plenty of ...

 

Recently I was given a task of creating a quick example of someone making a data change to a database table then someone else being able to see the new data. Seemed simple enough. I created a WCF RIA Services application with a simple grid and submit/refresh buttons  on it. I brought up two instances of the application and had one instance change the data and the other refresh it. To my amazement the second instance didn’t see the new data.

I brought up SQL Server Profiler to see what was going on. When hitting the refresh button I ...

Those that have been programming in WPF for a while probably already know about defining styles based on other styles.  With the release of version 3, this feature made the jump over to Silverlight as well.  Even though this is old news, as Silverlight is now on version 4, I’ve found that this feature is still little-know, and it’s so useful, I thought it deserved a post.  In the post, I’ll go over the basics of how to use this feature for anyone to whom the feature is new.

 

Why Use BasedOn

Using BasedOn to define a style allows ...

In every Silverlight project I have worked on I have needed to set some default styles for use throughout the Silverlight controls. So I create a new Silverlight Resource Dictonary and typically add items such as SolidColorBrush:

 

It is great to have one place to define styles and for the case above colors of my Silverlight components but then I wanted to set a particular font family and font size. This wasn’t immediately clear to me how to do that because ...

  I have written quite a few WCF RIA Services applications now and almost every time I need to pre-fetch some data before showing a Silverlight page or dialog. For instance you might need to get all the years and employees available to so you can put them in ComboBoxes for a dialog. You wouldn’t necessarily want to do this in the Loaded event of the dialog because the dialog will come up with empty information then fill in when the query has returned.

Another problem is that the code turns ugly and hard to manage if you have multiple ...

There have been a few instances when I would like to have an identical copy of an object but want them to be different instances. There are a few brute force ways to do this by either copying the values one by one or by using reflection to iterate over variables, properties, etc. The problem is that these methods are not very generic and need to be tweaked for each situation.

I have discovered that there are a few ways to clone an object by serializing then de-serializing an object into a new deep-copy instance of that object.

Method 1 ...

I've been working on a multilanguage web site using ASP.NET localization. I wanted to return unique meta tags for each page in the user's language. There are a handful of ways to accomplish this (MasterPage codebehind, base page codebehind, etc); here's the approach I took:

1. My web site was already taking advantage of Web.Sitemap, so I decided it would be best to store the meta tags there as a custom attribute. Web.Sitemap's resources can be globalized, so I actually don't need to do anything special to the sitemap besides set enableLocalization="true" and assign a unique resourceKey attribute if one does ...

Falafel mobile experts make developing for your mobile market easier and more efficient.

The Falafel Mobile Team is pleased to announce the launch of Falafel Mobile, the best mobile application development assistance offered.

Executives need access to key data points anytime, anywhere. Gone is the nine to five work day, your managers and users need to be able to view data, receive notifications, and take appropriate action, no matter where they are, and at what time of day, using the mobile device of their choice. Your Line of Business applications no longer have to be constrained to the confines of ...

I just released a new video demonstrating the power of the new APIs in Sitefinity 4.0 Beta that was just released last week by the Telerik team (CONGRATULATIONS! to the entire Telerik team worldwide).

The essence of the video was to demonstrate the use of the regular APIs to create a new PAGE into the system using two different approaches:

1- The Regular API way that most core developers will use that require understanding of the architecture and the fundamental knowledge of how the Object hierarchy relates to the database layer behind Sitefinity 4.0

2- The FLUENT API way that ...

Falafel Software is very happy to announce Drew Wells has joined the management team at Falafel Software as Vice President of Products and Acquisitions. Wells joins the team with extensive experience building strong and successful product companies. He comes to Falafel from AutomatedQA, recently renamed Smart Bear Software, where he served for six years as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. AutomatedQA/Smart Bear and Falafel Software partner to offer state of the art consulting and training on AutomatedQA product offerings like TestComplete.

“Drew’s addition to the team signals an added focus at Falafel to complete the pyramid of consulting and training ...