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 Monday, March 15, 2010
Falafel is in full force at MIX 2010 in Las Vegas this year exhibiting in the Commons area at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino.  We are all very excited to be here this year to witness the latest and greatest on Silverlight 4, Mobile 7, Mobile 7 with Silverlight, ASP.NET, MVC 2, Sketchflow, IE9, Blend 4, and so many other surprises and fun week at the sin city!
Stop by the booth and ask for your cool Falafel shirt!  they will go fast :)  We would love to chat with you as well!
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posted on March 15, 2010  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
 Friday, February 26, 2010
Capitola, CA – Feb 25th 2010 – We are honored to announce the appointment of Steve Trefethen as Director of Software Training at Falafel.  Steve has been with Falafel close to 3 years and has accomplished great success as a Software Architect and Trainer on many technologies with dozens of success stories and satisfied customers worldwide.  Steve will continue building the training business for Falafel going forward while participating as a lead architect on many projects that come to Falafel.
Congratulation Steve! and thank you for the wealth of knowledge and experience you bring to Falafel.
  Steve Trefethen
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posted on February 26, 2010  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
 Sunday, February 21, 2010
Capitola, CA – February 20th 2010, Falafel released its new book “TestComplete Made Easier, Keyword Testing Edition” authored by Steve Trefethen, one of Falafel Software architects and head of training for the company.  The book was introduced based on the heavy demand by new users that want to use TestComplete for its productivity but are new to scripting.  The book, over 300 pages, takes a step by step approach of showing all the features of TestComplete 7.x from a Keyword Testing view without the use of scripting, which proves the power behind the Keyword Testing feature in TestComplete and the success it has gained in the industry so far.
The book is available for immediate purchase at Lulu.com
And for those that requested a FULL COLOR copy of the book, we are offering that too starting this edition.
  TC_Keyword_cover
     
posted on February 21, 2010  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
We, at Falafel, are very excited to be exhibiting at MIX in Las Vegas between March 15 – 17 2010.  We hope you will stop by and say hello.  We will have some fun T-Shirts to give away :)  It will be an excellent conference as usual with tons of news and announcements that will shake the software industry. I am excited to be there this year to see what’s in store for Silverlight, Mobile, ASP.NET, MVC, did I mention Mobile :)
See you there!
 
     
posted on February 21, 2010  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
 Sunday, January 31, 2010

Ok, it looks good, hey it is black :) fancy touches and demos well in Steve Jobs’ hands.  But do I want one of these?

image

The answer is NO, for so many reasons.  I have to say I am disappointed.  I expected Apple to continue being on a roll and bring something that will change the Tablet market forever after the failure of Microsoft and others before it in the pursuit of consumer happiness :)

  • No camera? What were you thinking?  I was expecting TWO of them in the front and the back.
  • No multitasking? Really? this is not a phone, so that is not ok.
  • Is this the Kindle killer, NO WAY, it is much better and easier on the eye to read on the Kindle.  Remember, FANCY and COLORS does not mean better.
  • AT&T, really??? AGAIN???  you never learned from the IPhone deal that AT&T was your weakest link.
  • “Excellent for surfing the web” Really? with no Flash or Silverlight support?  Which web are you surfing?
  • No USB?  Really??? COMMMMEEEE ONNNN
  • No HDMI or any other video output?  COMMEEEE ONNNN
  • No 16:9 aspect ratio for watching movies?

This device is the “most important device of Steve Jobs’ career” as he said on stage two days ago in San Francisco while announcing the device.  No Steve, it is not, you have done very well, don’t sell yourself cheap with a statement like that.

The impressive part about the IPAD really is that Monotouch within 24 hours released an update to their product that will allow you to target the IPAD while continuing to build applications in C#.  I guess the good thing is that the binary format for apps is the same as IPhone while including some new namespaces for the new UI dimensions and layouts.  Kudos to the Monotouch team!

Is it just me or you agree with my opinion? Let me know here by posting a comment

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posted on January 31, 2010  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
 Friday, January 22, 2010

Falafel software is very pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new Telerik RadControls Silverlight book and all its source code from the Telerik web site for FREE to customers and potential customers.

The book has been a huge effort in the making of creating a comprehensive step by step courseware in order to bring productivity and real life use of the Telerik RadControls for Silverlight suite.

Falafel is very proud of this 1100 page book and we hope that the Telerik community will find it valuable and will help shorten the learning curve of Silverlight, Expression Blend,  RadControls for Silverlight, WCF, RIA Services and so many other topics that come together in this comprehensive book.

A huge thank you! goes to Noel Rice, Falafel VP of Services, for his great accomplishment and the quality of his work.  This book is Noel 9th book authored for Telerik in the last 3.5 years.

Thanks as well to the Telerik team for their confidence in us over the last 4 years and their continuous help and collaboration in order to offer their customers the best products combined with the best service possible.

Let us know what you think about the book and what would you like to see authored next :)

imageNoel Rice
posted on January 22, 2010  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
 Thursday, December 03, 2009
I can’t believe I am saying this, but it is true! My IPhone 3GS is OBSOLETE! Couple of years ago when I moved from my beloved Verizon to AT&T in order to get my hands on the IPhone, I had to endure the torture, bad service and extreme ignorance of AT&T just for the pleasure of being able to use an extremely well designed IPhone. I love the phone and HATE the service. Visual Voice Mail, elegant UI, music, fast processors, hundred of thousands of app on the app store, etc… were strong enough for me to bite the bullet and go with AT&T.
posted on December 3, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [2]
 Thursday, October 22, 2009

Based on popular demand, we decided to make the Falafel University shirts available online in the Falafel store

So go ahead! Show them how you really feel :)

FU T-Shirt

posted on October 22, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
 Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Capitola, CA – October 21st 2009 – Falafel Software, today,  launched its worldwide web presence at www.falafel.com and design.falafel.com using the state of the art content management system developed by its platinum partner Telerik Corporation called “SiteFinity”.

“The speed and flexibility offered to us by managing our sites using Sitefinity is unparalleled” said Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO at Falafel Software, “The capabilities, power, ease of use, fast deployment and shared responsibility with team members to maintain our sites reduced the amount of time and effort to a minimum”.

Falafel has built dozens of worldwide sites for its customers using Sitefinity with great success and flexibility and it was time to build our own major sites using this great technology.

Falafel offers consulting and training on Sitefinity worldwide and builds custom modules for the platform to integrate seamlessly into the Sitefinity framework.

image  image

posted on October 20, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
 Sunday, September 27, 2009
Every 2 to 3 years I end up purchasing a new powerful laptop in order to get the latest and greatest of what is happening in the Laptop hardware market and run my applications and development tools very fast and furious :) Well, I just received my AlienWare M17x this weekend and wow! that is one good looking laptop. Very nice indeed!
posted on September 27, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [10]
 Thursday, September 17, 2009

I was so excited to see MonoTouch released two days ago.  congratulation to Miguel and the team at Novell! I picked up my MacBook Pro where I have been building IPhone apps using XCode (Objective C :( Ah! Karamba!), and installed Mono, MonoDevelop and MonoTouch as soon as I received it from Miguel (Thanks Miguel!).

Well, MonoDevelop started jumping up and down on my dock for few minutes but never started.  Looked at the log files and it seemed like a permission issue with the ~/.WAPI directory.  I am not really a MAC person, so went to Google for rescue, no mention of this.  Sent an email to Miguel De Icaza (Mr. Mono himself) and he put me in touch with Michael Hutchinson and BAM!, Mike is Da Man!

If you see this problem on your machine, what probably happened is that you never ran any MONO programs on your MAC before installing and running MonoTouch, MonoDevelop.  If that is the case, launch a Terminal window and type the following two command:

  • killall monodevelop mono mdtool
  • rm –rf ~/.wapi
  • Have fun developing for the IPhone in C#

    posted on September 17, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [2]
     Monday, August 31, 2009

    We are proud to announce that Falafel is a platinum sponsor of this year’s Silicon Valley Code Camp, along with Microsoft, LinkedIn, Oracle and Foothill College, and has several speakers registered for the event.

    Lino Tadros will cover the following topics:

    • Dependency Properties in WPF & Silverlight
    • Silverlight 3 ins & outs
    • IPhone Development in C# with MonoTouch

    John Waters will talk about:

    • Partially Connected Silverlight Applications
    • Parallel Programming with .NET

    Steve Trefethen is speaking on:

    • Extending CruiseControl.NET
    • Tour of AutomatedQA's TestComplete 7

    And Stephen Dempsey has a talk on:

    • Befriending Lambda Expressions

    There is a long list of other renowned speakers, come see us and get up to speed on the latest trends and technology! Also, we are hiring, to stop by us after our talks if you are interested in a Senior ASP.NET or Silverlight Engineer position.

    Cheers

    The Falafel Team

    posted on August 31, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
    The voting for the 2009 Windows IT PRO Community Choice Awards started and is now open till September 16th 2009.
    Take the next 15 seconds to vote for your favorite tools and services.
    Falafel Software is in category #30 for Training and Certification Services.  Also don’t forget to vote for our favorite tools from Telerik in categories #5,10,27,32 & 33
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    posted on August 31, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [2]
     Wednesday, July 22, 2009

    Two hours ago, Microsoft released Windows 7 to Manufacturing.  Congratulations Microsoft!.

    How is Windows 7 going to do in the marketplace is something a lot of people are wondering. Is it a good OS? YES indeed! I have been using it for a while and it is definitely a pleasure to work with.  I still can’t believe they were able to lower the barrier so much for “Aero” that it can work on more modest machines with no problems whatsoever.  The OS is fast and several issues that drove people crazy in Vista have been eliminated or fixed in W7.  For a development platform, it is rock solid and I have VS 2008 and VS 2010 running with heavy use of WCF, Silverlight 3, LINQ, MS SQL 2008, etc.. all day long with great performance.  What’s your thought on W7?

    posted on July 22, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Sunday, July 19, 2009

    Congratulations to the Axosoft team for the release of OnTime 2009 9.1 and especially for the IPhone client app on the Apple ITunes Store that was released few hours ago!

    I downloaded the app from the App Store and it installed in seconds.  Running for the first time, I was presented with the set up screen where I had to specify the URL of where the WEB server installation for OnTime for us here at Falafel Software was installed.  I found really quickly that the server required SSL to use the Client from IPhone, which we do not require for our Web installation.

    Spending less than a minute in the HELP of OnTime 9.1 directed me to the Web.Config file of the Web installation where the SSL feature for IPhone is turned on by default.  Change that line to false as shown below in your Web.Config file and you will be ready to go.

    <add key="RequireIPhoneSSL" value="false" />

    But to be secure I encourage everyone to run this IPhone app over SSL for security as passing username and passwords over the wire can be very easily sniffed without SSL.  It cost less than $30 per year and will take minutes to install the certificate on the server for this to work.

    Congrats again Hamid and Team at Axosoft!

    posted on July 19, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]

    Humm, well, that was a bad start :(

    I just got my Kindle 2 in the mail and I was very excited to start using it. 

    I bought my first book this morning and it was downloaded automatically to the device within seconds, very impressive. The only problem was, I could not open the book on my new Kindle.  I got an error saying “Unexpected Error”.  I reset the device, deleted the book, forced a second download, same problem.  Reset again and again, no go.

    I downloaded my book to my Kindle IPhone, that worked right away.  Googled on similar issues, found lots of entries for the old Kindle but not much for the new one.  Everyone says “Reset the device” which did not work for me.

    What I finally did, I deleted the book from the device, hooked it up to my computer via USB, went to the DOCUMENTS directory and delete the TWO tmp files for the book that were there and downloaded the book as a .tpz file to my PC then moved it to the DOCUMENTS directory of the Kindle manually.  That worked!  Don’t know what happened, but it was a bad first experience.  Hope this was just a fluke and I can just enjoy my Kindle going forward.

    image

    posted on July 19, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Saturday, July 04, 2009

    When:  Wednesday, 7/15/2009 at 6:30 PM
    Where: Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco

    Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO of Falafel Software is presenting this session at the Bay.NET User Group at the Microsoft offices in San Francisco on July 15th 2009 starting 6:30 PM.  Feel free to register for the Event here and look forward to seeing you there.  It should be a very exciting and fun session.

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    posted on July 4, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Thursday, July 02, 2009

    Capitola, CA - July 1st 2009, Microsoft awarded Lino Tadros, Falafel Software’s Chairman & CEO, the prestigious MVP award in the C# language category for the 6th year in a row.  This award is mainly awarded to few individuals worldwide for their contributions in the C# community and helping Microsoft with the short term and long term strategies of the language.

    Lino Tadros has been presenting numerous sessions on the language in the USA, Europe and Australia since the year 2000 in many of the industries’ top conferences.

    MVP_FullColor_ForScreen

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    posted on July 2, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]

    On July 1st 2009, Falafel presented a 90 minute Webinar on the WebAii Framework and the Automation Design Canvas product from ArtOfTest.  The Webinar touched on several areas like using the Automation Design Canvas in Visual Studio 2008, TestRegions, Browsers, AJAX testing and most of all Silverlight application testing in the new Q2 2009 Beta 2 release.

    You can view the recording of the Webinar below, make sure you view it full screen.  We hope you enjoy viewing the video and get a better understanding of the whole framework.

    Let us know what other Webinars and videos you would like to see about these topics for future presentations.

    posted on July 2, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Tuesday, June 23, 2009

    Today, Falafel Software released the latest edition of its successful courseware material of TestComplete for the new 7.0 version.  The courseware contains several new editions in many chapters and new chapters for Keyword Testing, one of the most exciting new features of TestComplete 7, and Web Testing as well.  The book can be purchased on Lulu and it comes in spiral binding format for ease of use during labs and script exercises.  The book is used as the main material for all TestComplete trainings (online, onsite & Summit) in the USA, Europe and Australia.

    For more information about TestComplete training please contact AutomatedQA at sales@automatedqa.com or Falafel Software at training@falafel.com

    TC7_cover
    posted on June 23, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Friday, May 29, 2009
    We, at Falafel Software, are very excited that for the second year in a row, Telerik training has won the ASP.NET PRO Readers’ Choice Award for Training.  This year is extra special as the award went to the Telerik Trainer, a WPF based training tool Falafel developed for Telerik and has been gaining tremendous success and adaptability in the market since its release last year.  Microsoft Germany has standardized on Telerik Trainer for all their Visual Studio Express offering on the MS Germany site.
    Since 2006, Falafel Software has been providing all Telerik training & Consulting worldwide and it has been a tremendous honor and a rewarding relationship.  Congratulations! to the Telerik team and the Falafel team as well! :)
    Telerik Collects 12 Awards at asp<i>.</i>netPRO Readers' Choice Awards
    posted on May 29, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Tuesday, May 12, 2009
    Julie_EntityFramework Julia Lerman’s book on Entity Framework is out and is recommended to learn the ins and outs of this beast.
    The picture below was taken with Julia at TechED 2009 in Los Angeles.  Julia and I speak in different cities around the world on .NET topics.  Congratulations Julia! on the release of the book and the hard work that was put into writing it.

    IMG_9278
    posted on May 12, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Wednesday, April 01, 2009

    Our dear friend at Falafel Software Gary Campbell, this week, achieved MCP Certification status (Microsoft Certified Professional) on ASP.NET.  Congratulations Gary! 

    Gary has been a solid member of the team working on the latest and greatest of technologies for our customers with great success.

    posted on April 1, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [2]
     Sunday, March 22, 2009
    This video will demonstrate the use of TestExecute 6 from AutomatedQA.com to run scripts and recording on build and lab machines without the need to have TestComplete installed.
    posted on March 22, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [3]
     Saturday, March 21, 2009

    Our dear colleague at Falafel Software Brad Divine, this week, achieved MCSD status (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer).  Congratulations Brad! 

    Brad just passed the final exam of Software Architecture after passing the ASP.NET, WinForms, XML Web Services and SQL Server exams before then.

    Wow!  Two members of the team at Falafel achieved MCSD status in one week, Congratulations to Brad and also to Falafel Software!.

    Microsoft Certified Solution Developer

    posted on March 21, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Tuesday, March 10, 2009

    Our dear friend and Master Consultant Adam Anderson achieved MCSD status (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer).  Congratulations Adam! or Mr. SQL as we call him here at Falafel during the last 5+ years.  Adam has been an incredible asset for Falafel from the start and a go to guy for many technologies.  He is always there for everybody to lend a hand and help grow the company and achieve great things.  Adam passed his last exam yesterday on Software Architecture after passing the ASP.NET, Winforms, XML Web Services and SQL Server exams before then.

    Congratulations again Adam! and we will celebrate with you in Capitola on Thursday!  You can Super Size! :)

    posted on March 10, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Tuesday, March 03, 2009
    Today was the second day at the MVP Summit in Redmond and it was a lot of fun.  This is my 5th MVP summit and it is so nice to see all the faces that I don't get to see except at the MVP summit from all over the world.  We spent several hours with Anders Hejlsberg discussing futuristic features to the C# language and the evolving of this powerful powerful language inside of the Visual Studio IDE for the next few years.  Met so many friends that I usually see in Europe and Australia while speaking at conferences like Miguel Castro, Richard Campbell, Steve Forte, Todd Anglin, Neil Ford, Remi Caron and many others... It was so nice for us not to be speaking this time but actually attendees :)
    These events are usually for us like taking kids to Disneyland :)
    This time is so special though because it is the first time I took my wife with me to Microsoft to see what I do and meet these friends.  She was shocked on how childish we all are when we get together :)
        mvp
    posted on March 3, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Sunday, February 15, 2009

    My dear friend Steve Teixeira, Product Group Manager of Parallel Computing at Microsoft, has been telling us at Falafel to keep an eye on PCP for a while now and we are definitely listening.  Some of us are taking PCP to a completely new level, especially when they can apply their techniques in real life scenarios.

    Our President and CTO, John Waters in the picture below took a night in the town away from work and the kids and implemented his version of PCP on alcoholic drinks, Swedish way!

    image

    posted on February 15, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Saturday, January 17, 2009

    For the last couple of years, Falafel Software has enjoyed a tremendous growth and success due to the hard work of its team worldwide.  On top of that list of hard workers is the company's Chief Technology Officer, John Waters. He has been a tremendous asset to the company and an incredible loyal friend.  With my medical story for the last 2 months, John has stepped up and ran the whole company in all aspects with tremendous success.

    With me focusing in 2009 on my health and continue as Chief Executive Officer, while doing training and consulting, I have the pleasure of announcing the promotion of John Waters as the President & CTO of Falafel Software.  The team is thrilled about the well deserved promotion and we are looking at an another very successful year in 2009 under John's leadership.

    John, congratulations and good luck.  Have fun and enjoy an incredible team of individuals that work extremely well together.

    - Lino "The janitor" Tadros

    posted on January 17, 2009  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Wednesday, November 26, 2008

    On December 2nd 2008 at 6:30 PM, Lino Tadros, President & CEO of Falafel Software, will present two sessions on AJAX and Silverlight 2.0 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM at the Foothills College campus in Los Altos Hills.

    Please visit http://www.baynetug.org to learn more about the UsersGroup and the two sessions.  Hope to see you there!

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    posted on November 26, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Thursday, October 23, 2008

    Hi Fellow .NET geeks worldwide! Are you going to be at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles ?  If Yes, then look for our CTO, John Waters in this flashy shirt seen below around the Telerik booth # 401

    We are looking for a few GOOD .NET developers and trainers, John will be conducting interviews right at the PDC, who knows you might go home with an offer letter in hand to start working for a fun and successful company.

    Best of luck to all and have a great conference!

    dotnet

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    posted on October 23, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Monday, October 20, 2008

    Lino Tadros (CEO) and John Waters (CTO) had the pleasure of presenting the new release of ActiveFocus 2008 Q3 this week in Denver Colorado at the PMI Conference.  The product received rave reviews for its elegance, ease of use and speed.  Stay tuned for the release of the product to the public in the next week.

    image

    posted on October 20, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Sunday, October 12, 2008

    The Falafel team from California, Colorado and Texas assembled once again for the 5th annual Maui retreat from Oct 4th to Oct 11th.  We all had a wonderful time and got a chance to celebrate a very successful year at Falafel and enjoy each other's company and our families.  Cheers to all the Falafelites for a great year and a great vacation!

    Hawaii2008_1

    posted on October 12, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Saturday, September 06, 2008

    I am very proud to announce that our CTO, John Waters was nominated for the Kerzner International Project Manager of the year Award.

    The purpose of the Kerzner International Project Manager of the Year™ Award is to recognize a project manager who has exemplified superior performance and outstanding project management methods, skills, and techniques, and their important contributions in business, industry, government community or not-for-profit environments. The award, established in 2006 by IIL, is named in honor of Dr. Harold Kerzner, Professor of Systems Management at Baldwin-Wallace College. He is a globally recognized expert on project management, total quality management, and strategic planning and the author of the best-selling books about project management.

    John has been an incredible asset to Falafel during the last 5 years and his leadership and Project Management ability have pushed the company to new heights and still growing.

    Congratulations! John for the nomination and best of luck.  I don't know anyone more deserving of this award!

    posted on September 6, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [2]
     Monday, August 25, 2008

    Steve was in Cambridge 2 weeks ago teaching a TestComplete class and while he was sightseeing with the rest of the class attendees, they insisted to take his picture with this sign :)

    Steve_Falafel 

    Good job Steve!

    posted on August 25, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Sunday, June 29, 2008
    Falafel Software, Inc. is proud to sponsor Juleah Nusz, a fencer with the United States Fencing Association (USFA). Juleah currently ranks fifth nationally in under-16 women’s epee and 18th in under-19 women’s epee.
    posted on June 29, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Thursday, June 12, 2008

    We enjoyed meeting the TechSmith team at TechED this year. We are big fans of Snagit and Camtesia Studio and all of us here at Falafel use their products for several years now.  SnagIt 9 was released this week at TechED with awesome new features.

    Picture below is for Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist of TechSmith, and Lino Tadros from Falafel Software at the show.  Stay tuned for great new announcements coming up from both companies partnering to bring the latest and greatest in technology to customers worldwide :)

    posted on June 12, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Wednesday, June 11, 2008

    The Falafellites are having fun at TechED 2008 at our Bronze Sponsor booth.  Rocking on RockBand for XBOX 360 till late last night with attendees for several hours.  Too much booooooze! We don't remember anything!

    posted on June 11, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Sunday, June 08, 2008

    I had the pleasure to be invited to participate on the "LINQ in the UI" panel at TechED 2008 this week with some of the brightest minds at Microsoft in regards to that topic.  I shared the stage with Amanda Silver, VB Program Manager, Erick Thompson, MS Program Manager and Charlie Calvert, C# community Program Manager.

    LINQ_Panel_1

    At Falafel, John Waters and Bary Nusz have been working very hard on releasing the new Telerik Trainer product for Telerik Corp. when they have used LINQ to XML and LINQ to Objects to simplify the UI code and make it readable and maintainable to build a XAML based WPF application.  The main point that we wanted to push on the panel is that LINQ is not just for queries and databases, but you can use it's power to build elegant User Interfaces as it is capable to work with any IEnumerable to accomplish the job.

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    posted on June 8, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Friday, June 06, 2008
    It has been wonderful to spend some time with the AutomatedQA team here in Orlando this week, during the TechED 2008 Developers Conference. Falafel and AQA have build a solid and successful partnership, offering high quality consulting and training worldwide on TestComplete, AQTime and Automated Build studio.
    posted on June 6, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Sunday, June 01, 2008

    image  Looking for a good time? Join Falafel Software, Inc. at Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2008 during the IT Professionals Conference June 10–13, booth #308.
    We will showcase ActiveFocus, a web-based project management and team collaboration tool enabling teams to quickly share information, track progress, and deliver projects on time. Group and one-on-one demos will be available.
    We'll be giving away three Zune® media players and a complete Xbox 360™ gaming system including Rock Band™. Rock Band will be set up at the booth and available for your enjoyment!
    Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2008 IT Professionals is the Microsoft premier technical education conference for IT professionals.
    Falafel Software is proud to be a Bronze Sponsor of this prestigious event.

    posted on June 1, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Monday, May 26, 2008

    Falafel Software today released its new TestCompleteTV.com web site, a subscription based video library to train on the award winning Automated QA tool, TESTCOMPLETE.  We are all very excited about the site and the possibilities it brings to our loyal customers worldwide.

    Subscriptions vary from $39 for 3 months, to $99 for the whole year or $299 for lifetime membership.
    Falafel intends to produce between 200 to 250 videos by the end of 2008.
    We encourage all members in the community to send us their feedback and their wish list on what videos we should produce first.

    testcomplete training logo

    posted on May 26, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Sunday, May 25, 2008

    TelerikTV.com was released this week as a show site for case studies involving Telerik technologies.  Falafel Software is very pleased to have its flag ship product, ActiveFocus, be the first product showcased on the site.  I was interviewed by my friend Cark Franklin, co founder of the very successful .NET Rocks! Internet audio talk show for .NET Developers, for an hour, we discussed the elegance and power of the Telerik radControls and dived into source code to demonstrate the architecture and implementation of these amazing components.

    Go view the video today and let us know what you think! :)

    Telerik TV Episode 1

    posted on May 25, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Monday, March 17, 2008
    Santa Cruz, CA March 16th 2008 — Falafel Software Inc, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner providing consulting, training, and software development for enterprise and small business customers, today announced the world wide release of the official training material for AutomatedQA's TestComplete product.
    posted on March 17, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Friday, February 22, 2008
    ActiveFocus is a Web-based project management application that unites project teams for peak performance whether they are located in the same office or across the world. The application, which is scalable and can be tailored to any business model, provides a complete overview of each project and and enables teams to capture all the details that are important to them.
    posted on February 22, 2008  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Tuesday, November 27, 2007
    image Yeah, I bought my new laptop this week after 2 years of using a great Dell Inspiron 9300.  The new XPS M1730 is very fast, very heavy and looks pretty.  With 4 Gig of RAM, 400 Gig of hard disk at 7200 RPM, Intel Core 2 extreme 2.8 GHZ each, 5 speakers, built in Video camera, Dual SLI GeForce Go 8700, Blu-Ray Disc, oh yeah one more thing VISTA ULTIMATE.  It was disappointing to buy the laptop from the Dell web site advertising that 4 Gig will make your Vista Scream, well I ended up the one screaming when I found out that Vista will never be able to see that last Gig of Ram and that the max a Vista machine can see is 3 Gig.  Really bad on both sides:
    1- Dell, why do you advertise such a thing when you know it is not possible to do.
    2- Microsoft! I have a hard time believing with all the advancement of technologies and the 200 new products you put out a month, that you are having a hard time making your flagship OS of the future see 4 Gig of RAM, that is ridiculous.
    posted on November 27, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Tuesday, November 20, 2007

    Falafel is partnering with Microsoft to offer this free half day seminar at the beautiful Saint Claire hotel in downtown San Jose, CA to celebrate the release of Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, WPF, WCF, WF and other exciting technologies.

    ActiveFocus Hosting

    Please join us on December 10th from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM
    Register on the Microsoft event site ASAP as space is limited.

    Charlie Calvert, the C# Community Project Manager will be there to talk about LINQ and Lino Tadros will present the usefulness of the new technologies.
    Hope to see you there!
     |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | 
    posted on November 20, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Monday, November 19, 2007

    Congrats to the VS Team at Microsoft.  The Visual Studio 2008 bits are being uploaded to the MSDN as I am writing this blog.

    Good luck getting it downloaded today or tomorrow, You might as well use Pigeons to transfer the bits from the MSDN :-)

    Cheers

    posted on November 19, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Sunday, November 11, 2007
    posted on November 11, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Saturday, November 03, 2007
    We will be in Las Vegas between Nov 5th and 8th exhibiting at booth # 832. Please stop by and say hello, we have a cool T-Shirt for you and some other goodies! We will be demonstrating our Project Productivity Management Solutions "ActiveFocus 2007" and we will also be showing a sneak peek at ActiveFocus 2008 due at the end of this year. If you can't find us in the booth, look in the Rum Bar at Mandalay Bay or the Craps table near by
    posted on November 3, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Friday, October 19, 2007
    Lino Tadros and John Waters had the honor to speak at this year's annual Microsoft DevReach conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The talks were on Linq, Silverlight and AJAX.
    posted on October 19, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Wednesday, September 26, 2007

    Wow!  I was told so many times that Visual Studio 2008 will ship in 2007, well it does not sound like that is a possibility anymore.

    Microsoft released a new date, February 27th 20008 to release Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008

    2008 Global Launch Wave
    963
    Days
    Windows Server 2008 • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 • Microsoft SQL Server 2008
    posted on September 26, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Saturday, September 22, 2007

    With the demands of new major consulting projects, preparing for ActiveFocus 2007 Q3 and 300% increase in the company's training business this year, Falafel is hiring!

    We are looking for:

    • Sharepoint Experts
    • ASP.NET 2.0 Developer
    • .NET Architect
    • 2 Technical Writers

    If you want to join a dynamic team, fun company to work for, excellent atmosphere, full benefits and work with the best on the latest and greatest of technologies worldwide, send us your resume at jobs@falafel.com

    posted on September 22, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Monday, September 17, 2007
    San Jose, CA – September 17th 2007 - Software Architect Steve Trefethen passed his first Microsoft certification exam last week to become the latest Falafel team member to be Microsoft Certified. “I am very excited to see the entire falafel team Microsoft certified again” said Lino Tadros, President & CEO of Falafel Software “Steve, is a high caliber Architect and I look forward to seeing him continue to pass the Microsoft certification exams to reach the highest level of their certifications.”
    posted on September 17, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Saturday, September 15, 2007
    San Jose, CA - September 14th 2007 - Falafel Software is excited to announce the first update to ActiveFocus 2007 Q2, which adds a much asked for filtering capability to most of the columns in the main artifact grids, and a rewrite of the discussion component, designed to make project and artifact level discussions even easier to use. The release also includes some bug fixes and minor changes, see the release notes here for more details. A free one-user trial version of the new release is available for immediate download from the Falafel community site and Falafel’s demo site is also running the new version. You can take if for a spin at www.activefocus.net/afdemo. Our hosted sites are upgraded to the new version as of today. Please check our roadmap here for details of the next release scheduled for Q3.
    posted on September 15, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Wednesday, August 29, 2007

    Falafel software is proud to announce the successful launch of version 2.0 of its custom built ERP system Velocity. Velocity handles billions of dollars of business for America’s leading organic produce company. Version 2.0 provided a rewrite of key parts of the user interface, using Web 2.0 technology like AJAX and Web Services to provide the data entry performance of a desktop application combined with the ease of deployment and central manageability of a web application. The system handles hundreds of users, hundreds of thousands of sales orders and invoices, and provides 24/7 availability and high performance using a scale-out Microsoft architecture.

    posted on August 29, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Saturday, August 25, 2007

    I had the privilege of attending a two-day training for Expression Design and Expression Blend this week in San Jose, CA.  The trainer, Joshua, was knowledgeable and fun to learn from.  We enjoyed his training and personality.

    Unfortunately, the product is just NOT ready for prime time.  I was shocked! Really shocked! Poor guy had to apologize almost every three minutes for two days on how the product works and why he has to do things in a very awkward way to get it to behave.
    First the IDE is not intuitive at all.  I thought, hey I am a developer, maybe this is just not for me, but all the designers in the room were shaking their heads as well.

    There was total confusion between canvas and layers in Blend, disturbing implementation for differentiating between selection and scope that could easily waste hours of work. There lacked in the IDE a clear path to redirect the effort to the correct path.
    Look at the Trigger clickable button in the IDE in the picture below.

    image

    I thought you click that to access the Trigger page, nope, if you click on that Trigger button, you will delete the only trigger you have on your WPF form.  Who designed this IDE?
    Yes I can see now the + sign and the minus sign but that is just not the way it is done guys.
    At some point the IDE will be so cluttered with docked windows that it rendered the experience of working in the IDE totally useless.
    You can save your designs as .Design files in Expression Design and export the XAML to Blend. That is a one way street; blend can not send the xaml back to design.  Expression Design does not know anything about .XAML files either and can not open them.  Just make them!
    The scrollbar in the properties window disappears often and the user can no longer get to the properties off the screen space currently visible. Eventually, resizing the docked windows brings back the scrollbar.
    Modifying XAML code in the editor sometimes does not reflect the change in the designer unless you close down the project and reopen.
    Ok, that is enough, you get the picture.  Great idea, powerful product, long way to go to get it to be productive and useful.

    posted on August 25, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Sunday, July 29, 2007

    Back at TechEd 2007 in Orlando, Florida, both teams celebrated the release of the Telerik radControls Training courseware authored by Falafel Software and the start of a great relationship.  Here at Falafel we have nothing but respect and admiration for Telerik's products and their quality.  At the same time, we all here enjoy the Bulgarian spirit, sense of humor and great team.

    The picture below was taken at the Texas De Brazil steakhouse with both teams after 14 bottles of Wine, and a lot of other weird drinks, for some reason no one remembers this picture on both teams Beer

    posted on July 29, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Friday, July 06, 2007
    It’s a big week for the staff at Falafel who has been cooking up a course certain to whet the appetite for project teams everywhere. With the release of ActiveFocus, the Falafel team has once again demonstrated their ability to deliver as promised.
    posted on July 6, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Thursday, July 05, 2007
    SAN JOSE, Calif. July 5, 2007 -- Falafel Software, an industry leader in consulting, training, and software development is pleased to announce the hiring of Steve Trefethen as Software Architect. Trefethen, former R&D Staff Engineer at CodeGear, Borland’s Developer Tools Group, has over 15 years of experience working along side some of the world’s leading software developers.
    posted on July 5, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]
     Sunday, July 01, 2007
    Falafel Software is pleased to announce the arrival of the ActiveFocus public download. This download, available on the Falafel Software community server, enables anyone to utilize a fully functional version of ActiveFocus with no expirations, demos, or crippling. From installation to completing your first project, the ActiveFocus public download gives you a direct experience of the compete ActiveFocus.
    posted on July 1, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [2]
     Saturday, June 02, 2007

    San Jose, CA June 2nd 2007 - While the software industry has benefited greatly from project productivity management solutions, very few industries have seen a truly all-inclusive easy-to-use tool for managing projects throughout their entire lifecycle. Falafel Software has recognized this industry gap and has developed ActiveFocus, a Web 2.0 application that allows multiple types of organizations to take advantage of modern project management technologies. ActiveFocus represents the first truly multipurpose project productivity solution on the market today and Falafel Software is proudly launching it at Microsoft TechEd in Orlando, Florida, June 4th to 8th 2007.

    "Calling ActiveFocus a multipurpose project productivity solution really doesn't even scratch the surface of what our product can do," remarked Lino Tadros, President and CEO of Falafel Software

    "What's really remarkable is all of the amazing features that will help any business get through any project. We're really excited about ActiveFocus and our current partners and customers are eagerly waiting to see what ActiveFocus can do for them."

    “It is exciting to see how customers such as Falafel Software have used the power and productivity of ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to deliver a project productivity management solution to their customers,” said Keith Smith, group product manager of the Developer Tools Team at Microsoft Corp. “The combination of ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX and SQL Server 2005 gives ActiveFocus a solid platform for developing its applications.”

    posted on June 2, 2007  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Friday, November 03, 2006

    Campbell, CA - November 3rd 2006 - Falafel Software is proud to announce that as of November 1, 2006, every member of the Falafel team has achieved MCP status by having passed one or more Microsoft Certification Exams.

    "This is a monumental achievement for the Falafel team as I know of no other company with 100% of its team having this level of certification." says Lino Tadros, President of Falafel. "It reflects our commitment to the development community and to the high standards of professionalism and talent we give to our clients."
    Go Falafel!

    posted on November 3, 2006  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Monday, October 30, 2006

    Campbell, CA - October 30th 2006 - Falafel Software today earned the prestigious Microsoft Gold Partner Certification level.

    "It is very exciting to all of us at Falafel to achieve this milestone", said Lino Tadros, President & CEO of Falafel Software "We intend to use the new Gold level to create an even stronger relationship with Microsoft for Training and Consulting in the .NET 3.0 based technologies."
    Falafel Software is a Gold Certified Partner with ISV Solution Provider and Mobility competencies.

    posted on October 30, 2006  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Monday, September 25, 2006

    Falafel Software launched their fast and easy to use web site that promotes their software development, consulting, and training services. In addition to promoting Falafel’s products and services, the site also features informative blogs by Falafel employees, an active community forum, and a store where Falafel and AutomatedQA products can be purchased.

    The site also marks the debut of Falafel’s new creative director, Eric Titolo. On the Falafel web site, Eric spent many hours researching the previous Falafel sites trying to figure the best way of presenting the products and services Falafel has to offer.

    “One the of the first things a web designer should do before even attempting a look and feel is to really sit down and contemplate the existing content,” remarked Mr. Titolo. “You really need to determine whether the site is organized in a way that your customers will understand and is easy to use. If it isn’t, you’re ultimately wasting your time and money.”

    After the Falafel team agreed on the site’s organization, they moved into the marketing and design. “It really started out as a joke,” chuckled Eric. “I made this design flat with a graphic of a delicious looking falafel sandwich. Then I started thinking: why not make reference to food in the company’s slogan? There’s plenty of sayings in food services that can cross over into software. So I came up with the slogan ‘Made to Order’.”

    Regardless of starting as a joke, the “made to order” slogan captures the philosophy of Falafel Software. Falafel provides top quality software, consulting, and training that meets the individual needs of every one of their clients. In other words, Falafel Software specializes in making sure your project is made to order.

    “I absolutely loved the new slogan,” exclaimed Ramesh Theivendran, Principal Architect. “It makes me hungry just thinking about it!”

    “I am extremely happy with the new web site. I think it really reflects who we are and where we are going,” remarked president, Lino Tadros. “Falafel prides itself on providing top quality products and services that are truly ‘made to order.’ Our new web site allows us to promote our objectives confidently and tastefully.”

    posted on September 25, 2006  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Friday, September 22, 2006

    Written by Phillip Blanton

    There seems to be a lot of trouble encountered by people attempting their first install of DotnetNuke 4.x. I have developed a step by step guide for installing a new Dnn4 development system on your Windows XP machine, and I find that I am constantly looking for the last place I posted it so that I can copy and paste it into a new thread.

    I figured that Falafel would be a good place to stick it. That way I can just post a link to this one static location whenever I need to share this information.

    If you follow these steps to the letter, you *WILL* have a DotNetNuke installation running on Windows XP Professional. If you want to then open and compile the solution in Visual Studio, that is the subject of another post, but let's first get you installed...

    -----
    Update: There is a lot of confusion about which system account needs permission to the database and directory structure of your DNN installation. It used to be "ASPNET" on non XP and Server 2000 machines, and "NETWORK SERVICE" on Windows Server 2003 machines. Now it is a little more complicated.

    If you are running IIS 6, then you should use "NETWORK SERVICE". If you are using IIS 5.x, then  you should use "ASPNET". Without regard to the OS.

    The rese of these instructions will refer to "ASP System Account". Please substitute either ASPNET or  "NETWORK SERVICE" as appropriate to your version of IIS.
    -----

    1. Unzip the DotNetNuke 4.x Source Install zip into an empty directory where it will reside on your machine. In my case that is D:\Development\WebProjects\DnnDev.

    2. Right click on the DnnDev directory and select "Sharing and Security" and click the Security tab.

    (If you don't have a security tab, click "Tools | Folder Options", select the "View" tab, scroll to the bottom and turn off simple file sharing. Close the dialog and repeat step 2.)

    3. Click the "Add" button and in the "Enter the Object Names to Select" area, enter the necessary
    ASP System Account.

    4. Click the [Check Names] button and the system username will be verified and fully qualified. Click OK.

    5. Select the new user account and give it "Modify" permission. It doesn't need "Full Control". Click OK.

    6. Back in the WebRoot directory, Make a copy of the release.config file and rename it "web.config". Also copy the \config\SiteUrls.config file to WebRoot.

    7. Open the web.config file in a text editor (Textpad is the best, so go buy it now!) I use SQLServer Developer edition and not SQL Server Express so these directions are for SQL Server.

    Comment out the two SQL Express SiteSqlServer keys, and uncomment the SQL Server 2000 / 2005 ones and set the "value" element of them both as follows...

    "Server=(local);Database=DnnDev;trusted_connection=yes;"

    Make both SiteSqlServer keys have the same connection string. Save and close the text editor. Don't modify anything else in the web.config file.

    -----
    SQL Server:

     This is slightly different in SQL Server 2005 and SQLServer 2000, but the concepts are the same.

    Before you create the database...

    8. Start up SQL Server Enterprise Manager and expand the "Security" section. Make sure
    the ASP System Account has been added to the list of "Logins" and given default access to "master".

    9. Collapse the security node, right click on the "Databases" node and select "New Database". Name the database DnnDev (or whatever you called it in the connection strings in step 7). Accept all defaults and let the Enterprise Manager create the database.

    10. Expand the new DnnDev database node and select "Users". Right click in the users area and select "New Database User". From the drop down list, select the
    ASP System Account account you just created. Give it dbowner access. Click OK.

    Close the SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

    -----
    IIS Administrator:

    11. Open IIS Adminstrator applet and add a new virtual directory to the default website. Name it "DnnDev", point it to the
    D:\Development\WebProjects\DnnDev directory. Make sure "Read" and "Run Scripts" are checked and accept all other defaults.

    12. Right Click
    the new website entry in IIS and click "Properties". Select the "ASP.NET" tab and make sure you are running the 2.0.50215.0 version of ASP.NET.

    Setup is now complete. If there is not a problem with the system, opening up IE or Firefox and navigating to http://localhost/dnndev will instantiate the DotNetNuke installer. After the installer has completed, there will be a link at the bottom of the page that will take you to the new portal site. Installation will only run once. After which point, navigating to http://localhost/dnndev
    will just display the site.

    posted on September 22, 2006  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [1]
     Friday, March 31, 2006

    In .NET 1.1 we always had a problem using the built in Mail class in the System.Net namespace whenever the mail server was on a different server than the authenticating web server because it lacked the authentication feature to the SMTP that allows for this to be transfered correctly.  So we always ended up using a 3rd party component like ASPNETEMAIL which worked pretty well for us.
    With the release of .NET 2.0 obviously Microsoft worked on that feature and added the authentication feature to the Mail class. 
    This is simple code to show how easy now it is to make this work in .NET 2.0

    1 System.Net.Mail.MailMessage Email = new System.Net.Mail.MailMessage ("spamMe@falafel.com", "SpamThis@falafel.com");
    2 Email.Subject = "test subject";
    3 Email.Body = "this is a test";
    4 System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient mailClient = new System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient();
    5 //This object stores the authentication values
    6 System.Net.NetworkCredential basicAuthenticationInfo = new System.Net.NetworkCredential ("username", "password");
    7 mailClient.Host = "mail.falafel.com";
    8 mailClient.UseDefaultCredentials = false;
    9 mailClient.Credentials = basicAuthenticationInfo;
    10 mailClient.Send(Email);
    posted on March 31, 2006  #    by Lino Tadros  Comments [0]