Many Windows Phone 7 developers (including those at Falafel) are pretty excited about the new features available in the upcoming ‘Windows Phone Mango’ update.  One of the features we are hearing a lot about is the new ‘deep linking’ through push notifications and also in live tiles.  It’s easy to find article after article listing this as one of the exciting upgrades to the WP7.

What’s not so easy to find is a simple example of these deep links!  Even the examples from MSDN which were supposed to be previewing the new release seemed to leave out this important part.  ...

Capitola, CA: Falafel Software cements its position as the Premier Platinum Sitefinity Partner by announcing the following two key contributions:

First, Falafel Software has partnered with Telerik in designing, authoring and delivering the entire on-demand developer training program, a set of in depth videos covering every aspect of the award winning Sitefinity 4 product. The training was built in collaboration with the same set of engineers that has gained industry recognition for their dedication to high quality Sitefinity Training and a host of Sitefinity Modules.

“We have been working tightly with the Telerik Sitefinity team since long before Sitefinity ...

A question that comes up often from developers who are working with Silverlight and WCF RIA Services: why does my Silverlight application throw an exception when it has been idle for a period of time?  As you might expect, it is due to the authenticated session timing out.  But it isn’t quite that straightforward.  Because Silverlight uses a client/server architecture, the client can operate independent of the server for an indefinite period of time.  It is only when the Silverlight client makes a call to the server that the server-side timeout is realized.

There are a few options to handle ...

I was among the lucky ones to get a ticket to Apple’s sold-out WWDC this year and I’ll tell you right off that this post is not going to do much to lessen my (of course undeserved) reputation as Falafel’s Apple fanboy – but I mostly loved this conference.

The Keynote

Of course the WWDC Keynote is always a big deal, consumer oriented, the only part of WWDC not under NDA, and often used to launch new hardware and (in this year’s case) software.  Even knowing this, I underestimated how big of a deal ...

I recently encountered a problem installing local help from online using the Help Library Manager. I run under a Standard User Account on Windows Vista, and I run Visual Studio 2010 as an Administrator. When I tried to install local help from online, I got an error dialog that said “An exception has occurred. See the Event Log for details.” In the Event Viewer, I found the following:

• Level: Error
• Source: HelpLibManager
• Event ID: 1003

An error occurred while updating local content: Microsoft.Help.CacheLib.CacheLibBitsException: The operation being requested was not performed because the user has not logged on to the network. ...

There are times when you need to dynamically create filters for displaying content items in Sitefinity 4. You may be determining the filter from the URL query string parameters or session. So how do you pass in your filter? We will work with the NewsView control, but this should work for any content-based item.

There is a FilterExpression property on the content:

The question remains - what expressions are valid and what kind of syntax to use? Instead of giving you a single example of what works, here is a list of filter expressions that you can use. ENJOY!

You can access Sitefinity Form entries using GetValue(), but you may want to chug through new form columns without knowing what they are named. In the blog How to access Sitefinity Form Response Data Programmatically, Gary Campbell explores syntax that looks something like this:

You need to know "MyFormColumnName" to get the form entry value. Telerik hasn't surfaced methods to snag these easily, but using LINQ we can spelunk into a form's description and rip out what we want.

Get All Form Columns

To get all form columns including ...

Snickers fans know how nice nougat can be, even if they don’t really know what it is.  Microsoft produces a different kind of NuGet that’s also really nice and not well understood.

The NuGet site on codeplex says that it is a “package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development”. 

That’s a good summary, but here’s how I think of it--I no longer have to worry so much about keeping all my .NET tools and libraries up-to-date or spend a lot of time figuring out ...

Here is a technique to migrate Sitefinity from a MySQL database to a MSSQL database. I will be assuming the following things:

• You already have a Sitefinity DB hosted in MySQL
• You already have an empty Sitefinity DB created in MSSQL

Here is what you need to do to move the data from MySQL to MSSQL.

1. Download and install the MySQL ODBC Connector

1. Configure a new ODBC System DSN with the connection info for your MySQL DB, specifying the following string for the initial statement: “set sql_mode=’ANSI_QUOTES’”. I found it convenient to specify and save the login credentials in the ...