Here's a tip for the iOS beginners among us:  Just because something is on the left doesn't mean it's called Left.  LeftBarButtonItem, for example, might just take you down the wrong path if you’re not careful.

Let's say you are wanting to show customized text on the button that shows up on the left side of the navigation bar in an iOS app.  In an unmodified Master-Details iPhone app, it is the button that returns you to the Master table view screen from within the Details view.

By default, that button displays the Title text from the previous ViewController.  The ...

If you’ve been programming in Silverlight for long, you may have noticed the project setting “Reduce XAP size by using application library caching” in you Silverlight project’s settings.  You may have even checked it on to see what happens.

If you did try it, most likely nothing happened.  This is because there are a few simple prerequisite steps you have to take in order to take advantage of application library caching. 

In this blog post, I’ll step you through those set up steps.  But first, why would you want to use application library caching?

 

Why Use Application Library Caching?...

Falafel Software's donation helps the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics (FAST) host it's major annual fund raising event. 

It is quite easy to enable Out-of-Browser (OOB) mode when building a Silverlight application.  Open up the project properties on the Silverlight project and check the box to "Enable running application out of the browser."

The more difficult task is troubleshooting problems when the application works in browser, but not out of browser.  First, to debug OOB applications in Visual Studio, you need to open the Silverlight project properties and in the "Debug" tab, set the start action to "Out-of-browser application" and select the appropriate project from the dropdown list.  Next, set your Silverlight project as the startup project.  Now ...

The end of the year is upon us. Time to assess the status of that Sitefinity project.

• Did it ever get off the ground?
• Were all of the requirements met?
• Will it be delivered on time?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, we have just the deal for you. Through the end of the year, Falafel Software will be offering Sitefinity Consulting hours to new clients at a discounted rate. You could save up to 33% by purchasing one of these packages! The purchased hours are good for 12 months and can be used for almost anything:

• Planning to upgrade Sitefinity? - Leave that ...

When building Line-of-Business applications, we typically provide a variety of ways to search for customer or transaction data.  One of the common search types is a date range search.  Telerik provides an excellent UI control to select dates, the RadDatePicker.  

So now your application has a begin date and end date for your search and everything looks great until you realize that the end date is never included in the search results.  This is because the DatePicker control defaults to midnight on the selected day (0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds, 0 milliseconds) and if you use less-than ...

With the release of the HTC Titan, I needed to update a couple of my previous blogs.

In my blog Silverlight/XNA and Correcting WP7 Attitude Alignment, I talked about how to correct for any misalignment of the Attitude sensors with the phone body. With my Samsung Focus, I found that the Attitude alignment was off by about 3 degrees, which was noticeable in my compass application. The HTC Titan does not need any Attitude adjustment; its Attitude sensors are already inline with the phone body.

In my blog Showing the WP7 Magnetometer in 3D with XNA/Silverlight, I ...

With some very nice new features!

Instead of deleting and reconfiguring a whole new instance when you upload a new version of your service, now it is upgraded in place!

Even better, the deployment ID of the app (which is used in the DNS entry) doesn’t change, so no more having to update our DNS records every time I deploy a new version.

And best of all, if you have more than 1 instance of a role running, it takes turn upgrading them so your service is never down!

There are some nice new additions to the Visual Studio deployment ...

In my last post I came up with a simple compass application and how to correct for sensor misalignments. In that application I had a blue arrow that always points up and a yellow arrow that always points North. Now I wanted to add another arrow showing the raw magnetometer readings. For the simple compass application, we just needed to use the Motion Sensor API. To get access to the raw magnetometer readings, we need to use the Compass API to get to the MagnetometerReading property.

To set up the compass I used the Compass Sensor example as reference. ...

EventBoard is making waves again. Telerik just released a customer case study featuring our mobile conference companion: http://www.telerik.com/company/customers/case-studies/telerik-s-integrated-technologies-help-make-falafel-s-eventboard-solution-a-hit-with-audiences.aspx

When Telerik asked if we wanted to be part of a customer case study, the answer was an enthusiastic yes! At every turn, EventBoard utilizes a Telerik solution. The WP7 mobile application uses RadControls for Windows Phone, the administration application uses RadControls for Silverlight, and even the product webpage features blogs powered by Sitefinity.

Thanks to the Telerik controls, EventBoard for Windows Phone continues to shine as a model of style and usability. Expanding the use of  Telerik’s  Window’s Phone Controls in ...

Uploading documents to the Sitefinity library is pretty simple using the API, but what if you wanted a remote process to upload documents to Sitefinity? The first thing I thought was to look into the documents library web services. The problem I found was there was no web service to pass my file streams or bytes.

So instead of extending the web services, I decided to keep things simple and leverage basic HTML concepts. How about allowing a remote POST of a file to Sitefinity using "<input type='file' />"?

We can achieve this by creating an HttpHandler within the Sitefinity ...

I’ve always been interested in 3D graphics and wanted to investigate the capabilities of the WP7. As an engineer who has dealt with sensor technology most of his career, I was also interested in investigating the sensor capabilities of the WP7. Using the Mango Teapot as an example, I came up with a simple compass application to dive into these areas. This application is a Windows Phone Silverlight and XNA Application similar to the Mango Teapot but with a 3D blue arrow that always points up and a yellow arrow that always points North.

I found that the 3D graphics ...

Microsoft’s next release of the Windows Phone operating system is here and brings over 500 new features to handsets everywhere. You can learn to build apps that leverage these new features and capitalize on the growing Windows Phone market with our new book, “Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ Nuts and Bolts”. The best part? It is 50% off through Friday! Get it now with promo code “MangoWeek”: https://www.falafel.com/store/courseware/wp7nutsandbolts.aspx

“Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ Nuts and Bolts” is over 600 pages of step-by-step instructions, detailed explanations, and downloadable source code that will have you cranking out robust, user-friendly apps in ...

So disappointed in this web site www.amplicate.com.  They are dishonest and falsely represent people’s opinion without their permission or approval.

Few days ago after the release of Sitefinity 4.3, I shared my opinion on twitter about a feature that is still not implemented in 4.3  while using the hashtags #sitefinity and #fail to represent my opinion that it is a shame that these minimal features are still not fixed or implemented in 4.3.

I am a big supporter of Sitefinity, love the product and their team and have nothing but respect and appreciation for Telerik as a company and ...

Our mobile conference companion, EventBoard, is getting quite a workout this fall. Just a few weeks ago EventBoard ran DEMOgala, DevReach, VS Live! Redmond, and Microsoft Tech Days Switzerland all in a one week span. We are happy to see that the overlapping conference trend is continuing. This week,  conference goers are relying on EventBoard at the Sprint Open Solutions Conference, Grand Rapids Dev Day, and AnDevCon II.

The more the merrier!

Falafel Software's Director of Mobile Development recently spoke at the Sprint Open Solutions Conference in Santa Clara, CA.  It was the 2nd straight year he has been invited to take the stage at this event. What makes this achievement even more impressive is that each talk focused on a completely different technology. Last year, Lance explained the in's and out's of Android development. This year, Sprint's hot new product is the iPhone and this year's talk focused on just that. Lance happily shared his experience building Falafel's flagship mobile product, EventBoard, for the iPhone and demonstrated the versatility that ...

My friend Basem has a nice blog post about the most useful features of the Productivity Power Tools extension for Visual Studio 2010.  It’s definitely worth a read if you haven’t read it already.  Like Basem, I love the Productivity Power Tools extension and use most of it’s features on a daily basis.  And, until recently, I’d run into only a very few issues with it, all of which I’d classify as minor annoyances. 

Recently though, I ran into one issue that put me off track for a while trying to figure it out.  It happened when I created a ...

While I’m sure that this error could be caused by a multitude of scenarios, I think that mine is one that could happen pretty easily and is worth recounting in case it helps someone else out there.

I had a solution with multiple projects in it that referenced one another. One day, after merging changes from two different trees where one of them had moved some referenced assemblies around, this error began appearing. The error chain went something like this:

1. Project B threw the CS0006 “Metadata file ‘path_to_project_A\bin\debug\project_A.dll’ could not be found”
2. Project A threw some errors about invalid .resx ...

The mobile revolution has created a plethora of new platforms and languages. It is rare to see old technologies successfully reaching new grounds together. A good example of this is .NET MVC and jQuery Mobile. The blends of Razor, HTML, CSS, and jQuery make mobile a very familiar territory, a package that makes things quick, easy, and beautiful!

Setup the Project

The first thing you want to do is fire up Visual Studio and create a new MVC 3 Internet Application. This will give you membership, templates, and sample content to your website with a single click. Our goal from here is to extend it ...