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 ...

I have been using Telerik’s RadDataForm in some Silverlight applications for some time, and have been very happy with the results.  But I only recently discovered another reason to like it – the ability to do some non-collection bindings that are not available in the standard Silverlight toolkit DataForm.

If you have used either DataForm, you are probably aware that from inside of your item templates, the DataContext is always relative to the currently displayed item.  So, if I am displaying a collection of ‘TestData’ items:

public class  TestData
{
     public string  Name {  get;  set; }
     ...

Rounding the corners of a rectangle or a border is nothing new, but what if you want to clip other FrameworkElements such as images or buttons. The first step is to look at how to generate the necessary clipping geometries to give you the rounded corners.

Take a look at the clipping of the following rectangle that rounds each corner with a radius of 10.

Clip="M0,10C0,4.5 4.5,0 10,0L118,0C123.5,0 128,4.5 128,10L128,86C128,91.5 123.5,96 118,96L10,96C4.5,96 0,91.5 0,86z"

The quickest way I’ve found to decode clipping strings is to let Blend do it for you. After selecting the rectangle in Blend, select the Clip ...

Entity Framework can save you a lot of time when developing data operations in your application.  I am going to demonstrate some techniques to use calculated fields to filter or constrain your results in a LINQ to Entity query.

Before we get started, we’ll use a simple example of a Contact entity that has one or more Address entities associated with it:

public class Contact
{
	public int ContactId { get; set; }
	public string FirstName { get; set; }
	public string LastName { get; set; }
	public DateTime Birthday { get; set; }
	public List<Address> Addresses { get; set; }
}

public class Address
{
	public int ContactId { ...

Recently while implementing forms authentication for a WCF RIA Services application I ran into some trouble setting the expiration of the cookie that kept the user logged in. In the web config I had set the forms timeout to 120 minutes like so:

 1:  <authentication  mode="Forms">

 2:  <forms  name=".App_ASPXAUTH"  timeout="120"  slidingExpiration="true"  />

 3:  </authentication>

This worked just fine. After 120 minutes of the browser being open without Silverlight making a request to the server, the authentication had timed-out and I needed to log in again. Once I had that working correctly ...

Multibinding was one of those useful WPF features left out of Silverlight. There are several implementations of multibinding behavior flying around the web, but I was interested to see if it was possible to extend my GenericAttachedProperty framework into something that was easy to implement.

What I came up with was a simple extension that resulted in the addition of two new abstract classes that build upon the AttachedPropertyAssociatedObject.

namespace Falafel.Utilities

{

  /// <summary>

  /// This class is used with descendants of MultiBindingConvertAttachedProperty to implement a multibinding  

  /// converter operation. Override Converter() and  

  /// </summary>

  /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>...

In Sitefinity, the default “Forgot Password” page is very simple. It will look something like this:

If you want to put your branding on it or add some images, there is a simple way to do that.

Start off by adding a ForgotPassword  ascx control to your Sitefinity project.

Update the ascx file with the following code.

<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="ForgotPassword.ascx.cs" 

Inherits="SitefinityWebApp.Controls.ForgotPassword" %> 

<%@ Register TagPrefix="sf" Namespace="Telerik.Sitefinity.Security.Web.UI" Assembly="Telerik.Sitefinity" %> 

<%@ Register TagPrefix="sf" Namespace="Telerik.Sitefinity.Web.UI" Assembly="Telerik.Sitefinity" %>

<sf:PasswordRecoveryForm  ID="passwordRecoveryForm"  runat="server"  AllowSelectMembershipProvider="true"  > 

</sf:PasswordRecoveryForm>

When using a ComboBox or ListBox attached to a list of business objects, your list of business objects more than likely does not have an empty value object. If, for example, these business objects are from a database, the table definition might not allow null values. Changing the table to allow null can fix the problem but that might not be the best solution because it might allow invalid data to be put into the table.

A solution to this is to add a blank business object into the list in Silverlight, more specifically with a converter. We can use ...

In a previous blog I demonstrated how you can create custom profile fields and access them in code. When creating the custom profile field there is one common setting that seems to be missing from the properties of your new profile fields. That is a ‘read-only’ checkbox. While there is no checkbox available to make these read-only, it can be done. In fact, you have the ability to set your field to read-only differently in all the places this field shows up on your website (i.e. backend, frontend, creating and editing).

Here’s how you do it:

Assuming you have previously ...

We just uploaded the video of John Water’s Silicon Valley Code Camp talk on “Moving your Silverlight Phone Applications to Windows 8”.

Part 1

Part 2

In this session you will learn how to move your XAML based applications to the new Windows 8 Metro Style application platform. In particular, I will show the steps involved in moving the EventBoard Windows Phone 7 app to Metro. Topics involve code sharing, tips and tricks, differences, similarities, and unique capabilities of the metro platform, such as semantic zoom and charms (the search contract), as well as some of the built in WinRT ...

I have been using the new Http programming stack from Microsoft, WCF Web API, see http://wcf.codeplex.com/releases/view/73399. Very cool stuff! It works really well with their new HttpClient, JsonObject, and the dynamic keyword.

Here, I am calling a REST API to download a JSON object:

See how the string is the JSON string for the object?

Well, next I use the dynamic keyword and JsonValue.Parse to parse this into a dynamic Json object:

Note how it has keys for the two properties…

And notice how because I am using dynamic, I can reference these by property name!...

Right now, the DEMOgala event is running in the Sheraton Downtown Denver, and it is powered by EventBoard.

DEMOgala describes itself as follows: “Colorado is home to a vibrant technology industry and DEMOgala provides a peek into what makes our industry continue to thrive and excel. Industry leaders from across the nation will converge to relay expert insight on the influence of technology and how today's forward-thinking companies are reshaping our perspectives on business, science, entertainment and community”.

Our very own Mike Dugan is on site representing Falafel Software.

This is shaping up to be a very busy ...

You’re invited to participate in a very special event! Join two software industry veterans as they discuss load testing in the real world. Lino Tadros, CEO of Falafel Software and Sergei Sokolov, Director of Testing and Performance Products at SmartBear Software team up for a free webinar to lead a dynamic discussion about load testing and answer the questions you submit.

Running Realistic Load Tests: 
Answers to the Most Important Questions - Yours!
Thursday October 27th at 1 PM EST

Register Today! 

The harsh reality is that web applications today are rarely ready for the real world. More users ...

We had another awesome time out at Silicon Valley Code Camp this year. As promised in the Windows Phone 7 Kick Start session, here are the key downloads for getting started with Windows Phone 7 development. Minimally, to develop just on your computer using the Windows Phone 7 Emulator, you will need Visual Studio and the Windows Phone 7 SDK.

App Hub is the developer site for Windows Phone 7 with free tools and developer resources. From App Hub you can register for a membership that will allow you to submit applications to the Marketplace and "unlock" your phone so ...

Going to Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend? Chances are, you will run into a Falafel. Our entire team travels from all over the country to Foothills College this weekend, to attend the biggest (and best) code camp in the country.

We love being a part of this fantastic event. This year, Falafel is a platinum sponsor, picked up the tab for Saturday’s pizza lunch, built the mobile track, supplied 7 speakers with 11 informative sessions and donated our mobile application, EventBoard, to be used as the official conference app.

Our 7 speakers have been having a friendly competition to see who can get the greatest number ...

Going to Adobe MAX? Don’t miss your opportunity to meet one of the industry’s testing experts, Falafel Software’s CEO, Lino Tadros. Lino will be available to answer your questions in the SmartBear booth #113. Please stop by to say hello, challenge him with your toughest testing questions, and get an inside look at TestComplete and LoadComplete. You won’t soon forget meeting our extremely knowledgeable and entertaining founder!

The long-awaited Mango update is finally hitting the streets. If you can’t wait for it to roll out to your phone you can always try this.

For me, one of the most eagerly awaited features was custom ringtones. The omission of that feature in the first version of WP7 was almost a deal breaker for me, but I hung in there. After you get your Mango update, use the directions here to get your custom ringtones installed on your phone. For me, that can only mean one ringtone!

Falafel Software and Webucator today announced a partnership that will expand the accessibility of Android development training on the web. Webucator, a leader in online technical training, will offer a series of Android development live online classes based on Falafel Software’s popular “Android Nuts and Bolts” courseware. 

Information about the four-day online course, including a course outline and contact information, is available on Webucator’s website. Falafel Software’s courseware will be included as part of the course purchase and will continue to be available as a separate purchase from Falafel Software’s website.

“Having the experienced trainers at Webucator use our ...

It seems that Microsoft has positioned itself in the Google-Apple race. Now with Microsoft using Nokia hardware and Google using Motorola hardware, Apple has some serious competition in the future. It worked out that Steve Jobs quit while he was ahead; those are some monsters to be pitted against. So these are the mega-enterprises that will be revolving around "devices and the cloud" for at least another decade (who knows?), but what does this mean for the web?

//Build has pulled the curtains on pushing .NET to a second-class citizen in the future. At best, .NET will turn into a ...

On October 8th and 9th 2011, Falafel software will have the privilege and great honor of sponsoring this great event yet again as a  Platinum Sponsor and also offer seven speakers to present on multiple topics (Mobile, iPhone, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, Silverlight, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML and many others…

Falafel this year is in charge of the Mobile track and we look forward to presenting great session to the community.

We want to thank Peter Kellner and all the great people at SVCC that allow us to share our knowledge and experience with the the community and also learn ...