CollectionViewSource is quickly becoming one of my go-to tools for complex data viewing and editing in Silverlight.  The Grouping, Filtering, and Sorting operations make what were once difficult features simple and straightforward.  But I sometimes expect too much from CollectionViewSource’s performance with large data sets, and then things get more interesting.

I was working with large sets of complex data in a DataGrid, using the CollectionViewSource’s Filter operations to allow the user to ‘Delete’ rows while still keeping the items in the underlying collection to allow either a ‘Cancel’ or a ‘Save’ operation to finalize the change.  Since CollectionViewSource’s Filtering ...

When using the Silverlight ListBox, the default behavior for ListBoxItems is to simply appear all at once, but sometimes a more dramatic effect is needed.  I’ll demonstrate some code that will load each ListBoxItem one at a time with a Storyboard animation.

Within your ListBox, define an ItemTemplate as shown below.  This will allow you to lay out your content however you would like.  In my application, I am using a databound ListBox that uses a WrapPanel to display square-shaped tiles as the ListBox Items.  The Border contains the all of my content and I’ve defined a Storyboard for that ...

The System.Web.UI.DataBinder class in the System.Web assembly can be very useful for evaluating ad-hoc property path strings at runtime, but the assembly is not available to Silverlight projects, nor does an equivalent class exist in Silverlight assemblies. With a little bit of research and experimentation, I cooked up my own version. Credit for the original idea goes to Marco Zhou on the Microsoft Expression forums. The code he posted didn’t compile because it was constructing some abstract classes, so I made a few modifications. Here is the final result:

  /// <summary>  /// SL version of System.Web.UI.DataBinder  /// </summary>  public  static...

The point of this article is to get you up and running in an Android programming environment as quickly as possible. To do this, I've made a few decisions about the toolset, so that the environment most closely matches what we use in our Android training here at Falafel. To create the screenshots, I'll use a Windows 7, 64-bit operating system and install the latest JDK, Eclipse IDE and Android tools.

To start developing Android applications in the Eclipse IDE, you need to install four pieces of software:

• The Java Development Kit (JDK). The download can be found at: http://oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html...

We are proud to announce that Falafel Software Inc. was voted Best Software Design company in Northern California 2010 by the Best of the Bay TV viewers.

Says Alain Tadros, Chairman and CEO of Falafel Software, “Falafel is honored to receive this award. While we serve clients with our consulting, training and mobile offerings world wide, it always feels extra special to be recognized back home, and our Silicon Valley “neighborhood” has some pretty tough competition in Software Design”.

A segment on Falafel Software has been airing on Kron 4 for the past half year, you can watch it here...

In this blog I’ll show you how to create a simple web service that you can upload to any SF4 site. To do this you need to start off with a development environment described here. Basically what we’ll end up with is a VS2010 solution that has a Sitefinity web app and a custom project that contains a widget and our web service. To demonstrate the web service we’ll use the widget to make the web service calls.

Following the instructions here we will add a simple widget called WSWidget to our custom project. The code is very simple:...

As we welcome the New Year, we also welcome Sitefinity 4.0 to the scene. This is a real treat for the Internet. With a web service architecture (WCF), a built-in ORM, and integrated RAD controls, Sitefinity 4 is probably the most flexible content management system known to man. Just check out their API if you don’t believe me.

I am not the only one celebrating Sitefinity 4.0's arrival... Falafel Software threw their own welcome party and I was invited! This was going to be exciting… the largest Sitefinity Marketplace contributor in the same room with the leading Sitefinity partner.

The ...