At Falafel Software we are big fans of Microsoft’s cloud platform, Windows Azure. We’ve been consulting and building with Azure for some time, even using it as the service platform for our mobile event application, EventBoard. Thanks to Windows Azure, EventBoard easily scales to support events of any size, anywhere in the world. We’ve hosted nearly 100 events over the past year and can testify to the “Always Up. Always On.” mantra.

If you’ve been considering moving your system to the cloud, Microsoft is hosting a free online event that you might be interested in.  June 7th at 1PM PDT ...

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta includes ASP.NET Web API which makes it very easy to expose data through a REST API in either XML or JSON with very little code.  There are some great tutorials on the asp.net site to get up and running.  After working with MVC 4 for a while, I have discovered a few quirks, so hopefully these tips will save you some time.

XML and IEnumerable Properties

The MVC4 ApiController will automatically detect the request's Content-Type to see if it is expecting application/json or text/xml in the response.  One of my model classes had a collection ...

I have seen an interesting and sometimes annoying side effect of using Silverlight binding on string properties that makes them turn from a null string to an empty (length 0) string. Typically my bindings are bound to WCF RIA Services entities that can have a nullable string. By simply selecting and then unselecting a TextBox that is bound to a nullable string in an entity will cause it to become an empty string.

 

This wasn’t what I wanted to happen. I need strings that have been changed to empty to stay null if and only if the underlying entity ...

Next week John Waters will be speaking at DevTeach in Vancouver. One session is on the topic of cross platform mobile architecture, and another on moving XAML applications from Mango to Metro.

In few days, I travel to Cluj, Romania to speak about Windows 8 Metro Style Development and the latest in Windows Phone development as well at the ITCamp conference

 

This will be my 43rd country to visit, I am excited to visit Romania for the first time, as all the Romanians I know are extremely nice, welcoming and very funny , just the kind of people I like to hang around.

 

I am excited to see lots of my friends there as well (Tiberiu Covaci, Tim Huckaby, Martin Kulov, Mihai Tătăran and others…)

 

See you all in ...

Update:  Find more of these tips and tricks in our Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1 class, where you'll learn how to use JavaScript, KendoUI and ASP.NET MVC + Razor in Telerik's Sitefinity CMS. Sign up for Foundations of Sitefinity 5.1.

 Creating a JavaScript application on top of ASP.NET MVC is becoming more common these days. Rightfully so, especially with the new Web API addition to MVC 4. The clear separation between client-side and server-side is an elegant architecture indeed!

Retrieving collections and objects from MVC is simply a matter of calling the REST URL via AJAX. The result will give you ...

Nine years ago (On May 15th 2003), I had the pleasure and honor of starting Falafel Software from my garage in San Jose, CA.  It has been an amazing and blessed ride so far.  Happy Birthday Falafel! and Congratulations to all Falafel Team Members all around the globe.  I also would like to thank our partners Telerik and SmartBear for our important relationships and most of all our valued friendship.

It is amazing to see how many projects have been completed over the years in so many verticals (medical, military, hospitality, financial, educational and many others) with great success!  I ...

Microsoft TechEd Europe 2012 has chosen Falafel Software’s flagship mobile application, “EventBoard”, as the official conference companion for the event in June. 

Spanning 5 days and packed with over 1000 educational opportunities, TechEd is the premier European Microsoft technology education event, and this year navigating the event will be a breeze with EventBoard. Thousands of attendees will abandon the paper program and use EventBoard to plan out their day, navigate the show floor and stay connected. 

We like to think that TechEd Europe’s selection of EventBoard was an easy decision to make. EventBoard utilizes some of Microsoft’s latest and greatest ...

Ever since Sitefinity 4 was released, developers were coming up with new approaches to include JQuery libraries and plugins in their Sitefinity websites.  The unpleasant fact is that their JavaScript code did not work under all circumstances.

To make your plugins or libraries load in good order, your JavaScript code has to work when:

• You are anonymously browsing the Sitefinity website.
• You are editing your website in the back-end.
• You are browsing the website in Edit mode.

Sitefinity makes heavy use of JQuery and other Javascript libraries in its own administrative UI. Sitefinity loads jQuery when you are working inside ...

After coding in a structured environment like Java or C#, JavaScript just seems a little freaky. Like HTML, JavaScript has hung out with a bad crowd of browsers and learned beastly habits. As JavaScript matures, best practices are emerging that bring JavaScript in line with "respectable" languages. Two of the big guns for making JavaScript safer are the "use strict" directive and the JSLint code quality tool.

Use Strict

Add "use strict" to the first line of a function to disallow some of the flakier aspects of JavaScript and make it easier for JavaScript engines to optimize. The example below ...