Telerik Blogs

RadTips, Episode 5: Getting Started with the RadScheduler

babcock — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:35:30 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that another episode of RadTips is ready for your viewing pleasure. If you missed the first four episodes, I highly recommend you check them out as they covered the new client-side data binding feature of the RadGrid. This episode breaks away from the topic of the first four episodes and covers a new control: the RadScheduler for ASP.NET AJAX! The RadScheduler is a powerful scheduling control that can be used to create and manage appointments in the browser. Follow along as I give you the quick tour of the RadScheduler and show you how to get started using this feature-rich control with other fun ASP.NET 3.5 topics such as LINQ to SQL.

As always, code and video are available for download. If you want to see a live demo of the RadScheduler, I recommend heading over to Telerik's live demos.

[Video: WMV]

[Source: C#] [Source: VB]

Tips & tricks: Grouping in RadGridView for WinForms

raikov — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:05:14 GMT

Hi all, my name is Tsvetan Raykov and I’m a developer on the WinForms RadGridView team. With this post I am starting a thread that will explain some of the great, but less known features of RadGridView for WinForms.

One of the commonly used features in RadGridView is Grouping. Many of our users have requested having the option to change its default format and appearance. This is finally possible in the latest Q2 2008 version and I am going to cover the formatting basics in this post. The example and code shown here are available for download at the bottom of this post.

Creating Groups

Let’s start with the obvious – creating groups. In order to group the grid, you need to add at least one GridGroupByExpression:

GridGroupByExpression expression = 
    new GridGroupByExpression("City GroupBy City");
this.radGridView1.MasterGridViewTemplate.GroupByExpressions.Add(expression);

In our example we have added grouping by city:

Formatting the Group Headers

By default, RadGridView comes with preset group header formatting. However, it is simple to change it by using the FormatString property of the expression:

expression.DefaultFormatString = "Group by: {0}, Value: {1}";

where the {0} parameter of the format string is the name of the column that is grouped, and the {1} parameter is the value. If you want to have full control of what is displayed in the group headers, you should process the GroupSumaryEvaluate event:

void radGridView1_GroupSumaryEvaluate(object sender, 
    GroupSummaryEvaluationEventArgs e)
{
     e.FormatString = "" + e.Value + " has " + e.Group.RowCount + " row(s).";
}

To change the group header visual appearance, we can use the ViewRowFormatting event:

void radGridView1_ViewRowFormatting(object sender, RowFormattingEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.RowElement is GridGroupHeaderRowElement)
    {
        if (e.RowElement.IsCurrent)
        {
            e.RowElement.GradientStyle = Telerik.WinControls.GradientStyles.Solid;
            e.RowElement.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(255, 255, 198);
            e.RowElement.DrawFill = true;
        }
        else
        {
            e.RowElement.DrawFill = false;
        }
    }
}

The image below shows the changed grouping style:

Group Summaries

It is also possible to present more complex information in the group header by using Group Summaries. For example we can show the sum of the values of a specific column inside the group. To do this we need to add a GridViewSummaryItem that will calculate the sum:

this.radGridView1.MasterGridViewTemplate.SummaryRowGroupHeaders[0].
     Add(new GridViewSummaryItem("Experience", "; sum {0}", GridAggregateFunction.Sum));

Now we can do a little trick and get the calculated value by iterating through the Aggregates collection of the DataGroup:

void radGridView1_GroupSumaryEvaluate(object sender, GroupSummaryEvaluationEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.SummaryItem.FieldName == "Experience")
    {
        e.FormatString = " ";
    }
    else if (e.SummaryItem.FieldName == "City")
    {
        decimal sum = 0;
        foreach (Aggregate aggregate in e.Group.Aggregates)
        {
            if (aggregate.AggregateFunction == GridAggregateFunction.Sum 
                    && aggregate.FieldName == "Experience")
            {
                sum = (decimal)aggregate.Value;
            }
        }
        if (e.Group.RowCount == 1)
        {
            e.FormatString = string.Format(
	"{0} team has one member and his work experience is {1} year(s).",
       e.Value, sum);
        }
        else
        {
            e.FormatString = string.Format(
	"{0} team contains {1} members with summary work experience of {2} year(s).",
       e.Value, e.Group.RowCount, sum);
        }
    }
}

And here is the result:

You can download the source files from here.

I know this feature will be very useful to many of you, so I’ll be very happy to have your feedback.

50% more ASP.NET skins

Zhivko Dimitrov — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:28:31 GMT

�

A big thank you guys! Tribute to the generosity of you, our community, we now have 50% more skins available for the telerik ASP.NET components. Check out the latest additions in our Skins Exchange Program and feel free to download a copy for your project. Also, don't forget to�vote for your favorite community skin - we have an Xbox and free RadControls licenses waiting for the winners. Voting will close on September, 15th.

Once again, I would like to express our enormous gratitude to everyone who took the time to contribute their custom-made skins to the program. What started as a modest initiative with our last release is now, thanks to everyone, a truly useful resource for the whole community. The way you guys picked up the initiative felt particularly rewarding: it is as always amazing to see our community in action. We certainly hope the program will continue to evolve in the future with new additions of your custom skins.

Editing Telerik's Silverlight Controls in Expression Blend

Kiril Stanoev — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:31 GMT

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Along with the release of Telerik RadControls for Silverlight Beta 2, we also released a "blendable" Silverlight project. What I mean under "blendable" is that when this project is opened in Expression Blend, it allows you an easy and straightforward approach to editing the style of every control in out suite.

To begin with, go to your Client.net account and download Telerik.Windows.Controls.Blend.

Unzip the project anywhere and open the Telerik.Windows.Controls.Blend.sln files using Expression Blend.

If you explore the Project tab, you will find that each control is represented by a separate XAML file.

Open, for example, the Expander.xaml file. You will see that there is nothing more than an Expander control on the page. If you want to edit the ControlTemplate of the control, simply right-click the control and choose "Edit Control Parts(Template) > Edit Template"

After that Blend will show you all the elements that compose the ControlTemplate of the Expander control.

I am not much of a designer so I will leave the rest to your imagination.

The same instructions are fully applicable to the rest of the controls in the project. All the xaml that a single control uses is placed inside the resources of the respective host page. This means that if you want to edit the ControlTemplate of the TreeView you can find its xaml inside the UserControl.Resources tag in TreeView.xaml.

Visual Studio Tip: Using Code Snippets

babcock — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:12:21 GMT

A few weeks ago I blogged about creating your own reusable templates for Visual Studio. One of my favorite things about Visual Studio is that it offers a lot of great ways for developers to improve the development experience (and productivity) by adding many extensibility points in the IDE. Now developers have the option of adding on to existing features of Visual Studio with templates and macros, or integrating completely unique features directly into the IDE with add-ins. One of these extensibility features, snippets, adds a ton of value to developer productivity and is incredibly easy to use.

Snippets are small, parameterized code templates. They can save developers time by quickly generating repetitive code such as class definitions, property declarations, or iterations. Whereas before Visual Studio we had to drudge through such repetitive programming tasks, now we can add these bits of code to our projects with just a few keystrokes.

Using Snippets

In order to begin using snippets, all you have to do is type the snippet name and it will appear in Visual Studio's intellisense menu.

Once you have either fully typed the snippet name or selected it from the intellisense, simply hit TAB,TAB to fully insert the snippet into your code file. For example, typing foreach and then hitting TAB,TAB will insert a parameterized foreach loop into your code.

An alternative method for inserting snippets is to select them directly from a snippet menu. Using the shortcut Ctrl-K, Ctrl-X will open the snippet menu. From here developers can navigate through folders of snippets to find the right one to insert into the code.

When a snippet is inserted into your code, editable field are highlighted and can be navigated to and changed before the snippet is fully inserted. A change to a field will change all other instances of the field in the snippet. You can navigate the snippet code using the following keys:

TAB - Navigates to the next field
SHIFT + TAB - Navigates to the previous field
ENTER - Finishes editing, returns cursor to its position prior to inserting the snippet

Code Snippet Manager

Visual Studio includes a Code Snippets Manager which can be used to browse snippets by language, as well as add, remove, and import snippets. My next post will cover how to add your own custom snippets, but if you'd like to take a look at what snippets are shipped with the IDE, open the Code Snippets Manager by navigating to Tools | Code Snippets Manager... or typing the shortcut CTRL+K,CTRL+B.

If you'd like to get a head start on my next post and see what makes a code snippet, pay attention to the Location text box at the top of the Code Snippets Manager. When you highlight a snippet, Location will show the directory the snippet's XML file is located. Take a peak inside one or two to get a feel for how a snippet is created.

What is lacking in your WinForms app?

petrov — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:06:07 GMT

My name is Peter and I am a member of the Telerik WinForms team. Today I had to help a customer of ours, who was building a nice looking and very professional LOB application. He was looking for a control that would display the status of a process that he could incorporate in his app.

The reply was simple, although not so obvious – RadStatusStrip. The status strip is a good example of a very simple piece of UI that does not seems to be of a high importance, but if we take a closer look at the so called LOB apps, we’ll see that it is irreplaceable part of them. A nice-looking and fully-functional status strip control is one of the pieces that developers often omit to include in the specs, but which adds the final touch of any feature-complete app.

All you need to enhance your WinForms app is to drag the RadStatusStrip control to your form – it will position itself automatically to the bottom of the forms and you can start adding the items you wish to it. Since RadStatusStrip is a full-blown RadControl it can host any RadItems, such as buttons, input controls, progress bars, drop-down menus, and whatever you wish to use. Its appearance is 100% customizable, from both the designer and our WinForms Visual Style Builder.

With RadStatusStrip, however you can add some extra functionality to your app. Depending on the docking of the control, the orientation changes automatically – horizontal or vertical. This also affects the location of RadStatusStrip’s Resizing Grip. Our customers have found this feature to be very convenient in places where height is limited, or when sidebar functionality is needed.

Another especially unique capability of RadStatusStrip is the support for different Layout Styles:

In Stack Layout mode RadStatusStrip behaves exactly as you would expect it to, (i.e. as in Word or Visual Studio) – while resizing the application to make it smaller, the right-hand side elements that cannot fit on the form disappear. In this mode, all the elements in RadStatusStrip get a dynamically attached Spring property (set to false), which tells the control whether to stretch and fill up the free space in RadStatusStrip (Spring=true) or not (Spring=false). If there’s more than one element with Spring property set to TRUE, then the free space is filled up proportionally.

The uniqueness comes in Overflow mode, where RadStatusStrip arranges elements on more than one line, if there’s not enough space for all elements.

I hope this little intro on RadStatusStrip will help you add new ficntionality to your application.In case you would like to see any particular functionality to the control, please post a comment here and we will discuss it.

See you soon.

RadChart for WPF - Redesigned

milev — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:10:51 GMT

Some time ago when we announced our WPF charting effort a we received some feedback about the design of the control. At such an early stage of the control's development we were more interested in presenting the technical merits of the component rather than flashing some eye candy to please our customers.

Well, development is moving on smoothly and now is the time to finally show some eye candy - and boy, don't I just love eye candy! :)

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words so I'm posting some preliminary designs for the "Ice" theme our designers are currently working on. Let us know if we are going in the right direction!

New online resources for the past four weeks (08/04/2008 - 08/29/2008)

TelerikBlogger — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:49:40 GMT

Below is a summary of the new online resources available for our ASP.NET AJAX controls/WinForms controls:

RADCONTROLS FOR ASP.NET AJAX

RadMenu

Code library entries

Load-on-Demand Context Menu (with RadAjaxManager):
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bkkthk.aspx

RadTreeView

Help topics

Troubleshooting > Expanding nodes:
http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/troubleshooting-expanding-nodes.html

Code library entries

Navigating through RadTreeView with ALT + the arrow keys while editing Nodes:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bkdgae.aspx
Updating Drag&Drop operations to Data Base through LinqDataSource:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bkkmce.aspx

RadComboBox

Code library entries

RadComboBox Template Sample using Linq to XML:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bkdegt.aspx

RadScheduler

Knowledge base articles

How to limit the navigation to present and future periods only:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bamd-b454T-a-b454c-cbetemdget.aspx
How to scroll into view a specific time slot on initial page load:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bagm-b454T-a-b454c-a.aspx
Creating and adding an appointment template dynamically and accessing the appointment object in the template class:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bamg-b454T-a-b454c-cbetemdget.aspx

RadEditor

Knowledge base articles

Making the ShowOnFocus toolbar of RadEditor not resizable:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bamm-b454T-a-b454c-cbetemdget.aspx
Creating a simple link manager:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bamh-b454T-a-b454c-cbetemdget.aspx
"\r\n" being added to content when submitted:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bahb-b454T-a-b454c-cbetemdget.aspx

RadControls

Help topics

RADCONTROLS FOR WINFORMS

Knowledge base articles

Error 1325: [File name] is not a valid short file name" while
uninstalling Telerik Products:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-batg-b454T-ckd-b454c-ckd.aspx
Manually add Telerik assemblies in "Add reference" dialog:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bame-b454T-ckd-b454c-ckd.aspx
Migrating between RadForm and ShapedForm:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bamk-b454T-ckd-b454c-ckd.aspx
Closing the RadComboBox popup when a message box is opened:
http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-batt-b454T-ckk-b454c-ckk.aspx
Change the height of expanded child view in hierarchical
RadGridView:

http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/article/b454K-bage-b454T-cta-b454c-cta.aspx

Help topics

RadGridView -> Binding to Hierarchical Data Programmatically:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/binding-to-hierarchical-data-programmatically.html
RadGridView -> Expand all rows:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/hierarchical-howto-expand-all.html
RadGridView -> Column expressions:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/column-expressions.html
RadGridView -> Unbound mode:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/unbound-mode.html
RadGridView -> Export to Excel:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/export-excel.html
RadGridView -> Custom filtering (not uploaded yet)
RadMultiColumnCombobox -> DataBinding:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/multicolumn-databinding.html
RadMultiColumnCombobox -> Filtering:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/multicolumn-filtering.html
RadMultiColumnCombobox -> SelectedIndexChanged event:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/multicolumn-selectedindexchanged.html
RadDateTimePicker -> Set null value:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/how-to-set-null-value.html
RadMaskedEditBox -> Set empty text:
http://www.telerik.com/help/winforms/maskedtextbox-set-null-text.html

Code library entries

Application Portfolio with RadCarousel for WinForms:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bktgac.aspx
RadCarousel Image Gallery:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bktchm.aspx

RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax and Microsoft Expression Web

Elena Tosheva — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:41:00 GMT

This blog post is part of my research on whether the RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax support Microsoft Expression Web? The answer is simple - yes, they do.

�

If you only follow the instructions on how to use custom controls in Expression Web, you will see the result yourself. The main point here is having the Telerik.Web.UI assembly in the GAC and register it with its fully qualified name on the page.

�

Here are some screenshots:

�

Design-time:

Run-time:

Please, see for reference the�attached project which uses the latest version of the Telerik.Web.UI controls(2008.2.826.20).

�

Google Chrome - The browser in a Pokémon ball

milev — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:45:08 GMT

Well, someone finally did it! They've put a web browser in a pokémon ball!

The Internet is awash with blogs posts about Google chrome which just a few hours ago became available for download. I'm not going to just repeat whatever is in the Google chrome comic book. If you haven't seen it go do it now.

I am, however, going to tell you just how happy this new browser makes me. And no, it is not the warm colors or the pokemon ball thing :)

Google Chrome is just a great browser. It is very very fast, includes a slick minimalistic UI, has gotten all the geeky stuff right and it even has its own firebug-like development tool! Not to forget that the browser is open-sourced - a great step towards making the web truly open - something component vendors like Telerik can only be happy about.

Oh, and by the way I didn't get the chance to play with it for more than 15 minutes but I was browsing through the ASP.NET controls demos and everything ran without any problems. How about that?

Long live the pokéball!

Edit: No cake yet?

New "Online Help" is now available for RadControls for Silverlight Beta2

Nikolay Atanasov — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:05:43 GMT

I am really excited to announce the newly updated Documentation page about RadControls for Silverlight. Currently, you can directly open and browse the newly added Online Help or download the latest CHM file containing the same topics. We will be surely enhancing the content of the help files so that the users could find there most of the answers they are looking for. Our goal is to provide a wide range of topics - from simple "how-to" articles to advanced and complicated topics about our controls for Silverlight.

Emulating Paging with RadGridView for WinForms and LINQ with 1 million records

pavlov — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Our customers who use the Telerik ASP.NET line of controls are used to having paging in their grids. This approach, however, is seldom used for WinForms applications, although there are cases when paging in WinForms grids is needed as well, especially when there are million records in the database (literally).

You may have seen the blog post by Vladimir Enchev about implementing paging with RadCridView for WPF (if you have not, this is the right time to do so :)). A couple of days ago Mr. Enchev came by and said "You know guys, you could do the same thing with your WinForms grid control." And I decided to do so.

Paging emulation with RadGridView for WinForms is possible, especially if we take full advantage of LINQ. This approach also gives us another advantage - client performance. The data processing (filtering, sorting and paging) is obviously done by the SQL server, which is fully optimized for such things, rather than the application. The client only processes and shows one page at a time, rather than all million records. Here I do not use RadGridView's Virtual Mode - this is a topic for a more advanced blog post.

I have tried to keep the application as simple as possible in order to highlight the code that implements the actual paging. Here is a screenshot of the application:

The important part of the code is the BindGrid method that does the actual loading and filtering of the data:

private void BindGrid()
{
    this.radGridView1.GridElement.BeginUpdate();
    
    IQueryable queryable = new DataClasses1DataContext().MyTables.AsQueryable();

    if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(where))
    {
        queryable = queryable.Where(where);
    }

    if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(orderBy))
    {
        queryable = queryable.OrderBy(orderBy);
    }

    radGridView1.DataSource = queryable.Skip(currentPageIndex * pageSize).Take(pageSize);

    this.radGridView1.GridElement.EndUpdate(true);

    EnableDisablePager();
}

We are using the dynamic LINQ extensions for the sorting and filtering functionality. And yes - you guessed correctly - it is called when the form loads. It uses some class fields that are set from the event handlers in the application. For example when the user clicks the filter button the following method is called:

private void Filter(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    string text = FilterTextBox.Text;
    where = (text == "") ? "" : String.Format(@"Name.Contains(""{0}"")", text);

    BindGrid();
}

The sample also supports sorting by handling the SortChanging event of RadGridView. You can find the full source code in the attached project (the required Telerik assemblies are included in the bin/Debug folder).

Would you like to see more blog posts on using RadGridView with LINQ? Just leave a comment with your requirements and I will try to create it for you :)

WindowsFormsApplication1.zip

Shaders in WPF? Do you find them useful?

papushev — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:53:19 GMT

One of the most exciting things about the new .NET3.5 SP1 is definitely the ability to use Shaders (Pixel Shaders only).

As a beginner in that area, I am actively searching for information in blog posts, DirectX documentation, etc. Interestingly enough, a lot of people are keen on the idea of using those, but demos and even hints on possible applications are hard to find. There are a couple of "default" examples, a ShaderPad I find pretty useful, but that's it, no advanced examples what-so-ever. Additionally, I found a couple of cool examples (like those posted on Addam Kinney's blog), but those are NOT shader demos.

At the last couple of conferences, MS guys showed a couple of exciting demos, which deal with geometry morphing (see the link to Addam Kinney's blog). Those will most probably look awesome when vertex/geometry shaders support is added to the .NET framework. Currently, I find them CPU-intensive, which limits business application.

Back to the Pixel Shaders, an exciting feature is the ability to run the code directly on the CPU (instead of the GPU). That is a nice feature, allowing computers with older/out-of-date video cards to preserve "the touch of the shader". But usually computers with old video cards are also old, having weak CPUs as well. I wonder if those effects should be run on older PCs at all.

If you have answers to some of those questions, found good shader examples, or just want to express your opinion, feel free to comment on this blog post.

Send Telerik Report as email attachment

Steve Tsokev — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:58:33 GMT

The Report Viewers (Win and Web) do not support sending of reports via e-mail out-of-the-box. To mail a report you have to first render the report�programmatically�into a convenient format and then attach it to a mail message. Here is a possible way of how to achieve this by using the SmtpClient object:

�

    
            void�MailReport(Telerik.Reporting.Report�report,�string�from,�string�to,�string�subject,�string�body)� �
        
            ���{� �
        
            ������string�mimeType;� �
        
            ������string�extension;� �
        
            ������Encoding�encoding;� �
        
            � �
        
            ������byte[]�reportBytes�=� �
        
            ������ReportProcessor.Render("PDF",�report,�null,�out�mimeType,�out�extension,�out�encoding);� �
        
            ����������� �
        
            ������MemoryStream�ms�=�new�MemoryStream(reportBytes);� �
        
            ������ms.Position�=�0;� �
        
            ������������ �
        
            ������Attachment�attachment�=�new�Attachment(ms,�report.Name�+�"."�+�extension);� �
        
            ������MailMessage�msg�=�new�MailMessage(from,�to,�subject,�body);� �
        
            ������msg.Attachments.Add(attachment);� �
        
            ������SmtpClient�client�=�new�SmtpClient(smptHost);� �
        
            ������client.Send(msg);������������������������ �
        
            ���}��

�

You can find a sample report with both Win and Web apps that show the above code at work in this code library project. You can use our�Code Converter to convert this to VB.NET if needed.

Show me your IsNumeric() and I'll show you mine

milev — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:22:18 GMT

I was innocently writing a piece of code today and the need arose to check if an input type is a number. Naturally I started looking for such a method inside the .NET classes. After all for a framework which has more than 380,000 methods it will only be logical to have at least one which will do something as basic as this. Guess what? .NET does not ship with such a public method. Whaaaa?

But do stay with me, please! It gets better. Armed with Reflector I decided that even if there is no such public method there must be a private one at least! Thank God there is one. Here is what I found inside the System.Linq.Expressions.Expression:

private static bool IsNumeric(Type type)
{
    type = GetNonNullableType(type);
    if (!type.IsEnum)
    {
        switch (Type.GetTypeCode(type))
        {
            case TypeCode.Char:
            case TypeCode.SByte:
            case TypeCode.Byte:
            case TypeCode.Int16:
            case TypeCode.UInt16:
            case TypeCode.Int32:
            case TypeCode.UInt32:
            case TypeCode.Int64:
            case TypeCode.UInt64:
            case TypeCode.Single:
            case TypeCode.Double:
                return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

At first glance this code appears totally normal, but if you are more careful you will notice that one TypeCode is missing. Can you guess which?

(scroll down for the answer)

Answer: TypeCode.Decimal

Why the decimal is not a numeric data type according to Microsoft is completely beyond me. Perhaps some of you guys know?