Performance tip: Using sprites with navigational RadControls

Alexander Gyoshev — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:50:00 GMT

As a strong believer in sprites, I was inspired from a question that came up in a forum thread earlier this week, namely: how to use sprites in a RadTreeView? Well, I think it's rather limiting to write only about the RadTreeView, so this post discusses the technique for all of the navigational RadControls.

You can download the sample page and give it at try. Most of the code is quite straightforward - simply setting the CssClass property and a few layout adjustments. Please note, however, that this CSS is tightly bound to the skin that is currently used, so changing skins might not work (to be more specific, it won't work for skins that set background images to the text nodes).

Why go through all the pain? Well, great performance boost for every instance of RadControls that uses it - by both minimizing the HTTP request count and optimizing the HTML output of the control.

Oh, and... I would like to give some credit to Mark James, who created the wonderful Silk icon set that was spritified. Slickedy-slick!

Introducing: the telePhone

Alexander Gyoshev — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:00:00 GMT

After digging around in Telerik's old Visual Source-Safe server, I found a long-forgotten prototype of a RadMenu skin.

I felt the urge to disclose it to you, and hope that you will like it.

the telePhone prototype

On second thought, this initial draft looks good enough, so we might switch to hardware production. Don't be evil, we were first! Maybe we could even go 3G...

Ok now, getting serious - you could use this sort of menu for navigating when there is a large hierarchy in the site navigation (or, to be more specific, a hierarchy that has a wide tree). Currently, no scrolling is implemented - don't flood me with comments after you touched your LCD and the menu items didn't move.

For the techies: go ahead, download the project and play a bit with it. Most of the client-side logic of the actual RadMenu has been replaced, as this is a completely different concept of using it - read this as "external skin and event overrides".

iPod is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.
(We didn't register the telerik phone as one because there actually is a product called a "telePhone" - go figure.)

Alex Gyoshev's blog

Performance tip: Using sprites with navigational RadControls

Introducing: the telePhone