Last week I found myself debugging an issue with Apple Push Notifications service (APNs) on one of our development servers, and learning a bit about APNs certificates and Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS 7.5 in the process.

My first task was to try to isolate why the push notifications weren't received by our iOS devices, so I started on my local development machine.  I installed the certificates into my personal certificate store, stepped through the notification code, and sure enough I heard my iPad chirping telling me the notifications were being received.  It turned out that the certificates ...

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 ...

Update:  For more information, we've released a full JavaScript development guide: JavaScript Nuts and Bolts, and are teaching a class explaining how to use JavaScript, KendoUI and ASP.NET MVC in Telerik's Sitefinity CMS. Sign up for Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1.


JavaScript variables have inherent Boolean values (typically referred to as "truthy" and "falsy"). Interpreting these values can lead to semantic train wrecks like those in this snippet:

 1:  console.log("any string" ==  true);  // false

 2:  console.log("any string" ==  false);  // also false

 3:  console.log("" ==  false);  // true

 4:  console.log(null...

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

It's best practice to declare all variables at the top of functions. Why? In JavaScript, a variable can be used before it is defined. JavaScript automatically hoists every var declaration to the top of the function. Take a look at this example where variable "volume" is declared after its used in a logging statement:

The log prints "Volume is undefined", exactly the behavior you'd expect for a declared, but uninitialized variable. While the declaration is moved ...

The Problem

I recently discovered that the default Silverlight DateTime format is different on MacOS than it is in Windows.

On Windows

On MacOS

There are a couple of differences, but the most noticeable is that time zone offset at the end of the time that shows on the Mac. On my computer the time zone offset shows as “-4:00” because I’m generating a DateTime in local time, which for me is currently Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), or 4 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

The application is following the best practice of storing all DateTimes ...

You’ve probably heard it before: “Exceptions are expensive!” Maybe if you’re like me, you heard it but you didn’t believe it, not really. How bad could they be? Well, I was recently forced face-to-face with the reality of this saying, and I’m here to tell you, exceptions are expensive!

In my case, I was using a generic helper method that called Convert.ChangeType(). This method can throw, among other things, a FormatException if the input object is not in a format that can be converted to the requested type. Unfortunately, this particular class does not provide a way to check whether ...

I know, that title was a mouthful. Today I was posed with the challenge of writing a regular expression that would match an input that repeated the same word multiple times. Of course, it’s easy to write a regular expression that returns multiple matches of a single word, but it’s a little more challenging to write one that matches only once. Here is the sample input string we’re going to work with: “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.” The repeated word is “swimming”, and we only want to match inputs that repeat it 5 times ...

There are some instances where the the obstructive Silverlight Toolkit BusyIndicator might not be the right choice for your application. BusyIndicator pops up a control on top of all other controls that shows a message and a graphical animation. I wanted to create a more passive control that doesn’t pop up a control but it still disables all the controls on the page and shows a message on the page.

First I started by creating a User Control. Within this control I added a TextBlock and an Image that I’ll use to set some busy text and an animated image. ...

One Config File, Multiple Projects

MVVM (Model-View-View Model) is a programming pattern similar to MVC that you can use to decouple the model and the view from business logic. There are many articles on the internet about what MVVM is so I’m not going to talk about that. In this article I want to concentrate on the most basic MVVM application, understanding it, and how to move on from there.

This example doesn’t have a Model. More than likely when building even the simplest application you will need access to data. If you create an Entity Framework (ADO.NET Entity Data) Model, this would indeed be ...

When working with regular expressions, you will quickly come across these terms. Matches are usually easy to understand, but Groups and Captures can be a bit trickier to understand. I’m going to explain them with a simple and concrete example. Let’s start with this regular expression pattern:

(?<AreaCode>\d{3})-(?<Triplet>\d{3})-(?<Quadruplet>\d{4})

Here is a little cross platform gotcha that might save you some time, it certainly has bitten my colleagues a few times….

If you have a .NET WCF REST service, then it will by default use the DataContractSerializer. Now, imagine you have an iOS, Android or maybe a HTML client, calling that API with a JSON payload (or an XML payload), and hand constructing the HTTP payload. On the server (receiving) side, you see that some of your object properties are NULL, even though you can clearly see them being sent in Fiddler. You double check the spelling and capitalization ...

Regular Expressions are a super powerful, widely available, high performance way to parse text into useful parts for further processing or validation. However, developing them can be difficult because the syntax is terse and difficult to read (resulting in the commonly repeated joke that regular expressions are write-only), and Visual Studio does not come with any built-in tools to aid in testing and developing them. I am going to share a tool and a few pieces of advice that I have found useful in my own development efforts in the hopes that they will be of use to others out ...

Today, we are proud to announce that the final bits of the conversion of blog.falafel.com are finally in place and the blog site is better and faster than ever.  The final issue that stumped us for the last 10 days was the inability to use LiveWriter to publish blog posts to Sitefinity 5.  After serious GUID debugging, Fiddler and Wireshark sessions, we were able to pin point that the conversion from Sitefinity 3.7 to 5.0 caused a problem regarding the assignment of ONE of the Blogs (MINE ) as far as owner assignment between the OpenAccess37MembershipProvider and the Default one ...

What I'm Up To

I was working with a client recently when I encountered a completely unexpected bug. Figuring out the problem reminded me of some facts about how C# (and all the .NET languages) work and got me thinking about the fact that object-type variables in .NET are basically pointers, even though it’s hidden from you most of the time.

The Problem

An object instance was passed into a method. If the parameter was not null, it was simply updated, but if the parameter was null, then it was instantiated first, then updated.

It looked something like this: