Stoyan Stratev's blog

Improvements in the visual appearance of RadSlider for ASP.NET AJAX

Stoyan Stratev — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:03:35 GMT

The RadSlider is getting a subtle, but still important update for its visual appearance in the Q1 2010 release of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. We made the appearance of all skins be consistent so you can have more choice when it comes to picking the right one for your application.

Here is the comparison between the old an new look:

The first difference is that we have added a border at both ends of the slider track. The border is not part of the track itself. The second difference is that all slider arrows now have a background and look like buttons.Finally, the drag handle orientation on some skins has been changed. The slider will now actually point the drag handle depending on where you put the track (TrackPosition property).

We hope that these changes will improve the usability of the control and make it easier to integrate with other controls in your application. If you wish to upgrade to Q1 2010, but keep the old look, then you can simply set the slider properties EnableEmbeddedSkins and EnableEmbeddedBaseStyleSheet to false and load the Q3 2009 skin and base stylesheet manually on the page. Click here for a sample page that shows how to do this (using the old Default skin).

RadEditor dialogs - what's new in the Q1 2010 release

Stoyan Stratev — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:22:46 GMT

As usual, the next major update of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX will be packed with exciting new features. Unfortunately, this means that some performance related optimizations will be left in the background, which is why I want to present one of them here.

The Q1 2010 release will add a new property for the RadEditor's RadDialogOpener control - EnableTelerikManagers. When it set to true and you have a RadScriptManager or a RadStyleSheetManager on the page, the editor dialogs will start using these controls as well. The main benefit from the script and stylesheet managers is faster loading speed - due to less browser requests, smaller HTML output or the CDN support, if you have enabled it.

The best part is that this all happens automatically - the editor turns on EnableTelerikManagers whenever it detects a RadScriptManager on the page and since the dialogs are re-using the manager controls from the main editor page, you will not have to setup any additional settings (e.g. if you are using a custom HTTP handler path).

Not all dialogs benefit the same, but with the file manager ones you can expect about 17% smaller markup size due to script and stylesheet combining.

Accessible RadEditor used by the Royal National Institute of Blind People

Stoyan Stratev — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:08:27 GMT

I am posting this on behalf of the editor team here at Telerik.

It has been a really great experience to work with the folks at the Royal National Institute of the Blind People (RNIB) and Content and Code. The folks at RNIB helped us a lot to improve the accessible feature set of RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX and we are very happy with the results. We are proud to be the chosen component vendor for an accessible HTML editor.

The required changes to the editor client code were not difficult and added the needed features for blind and partially sighted people. Some of the differences from the default editor are:

adding shortcuts for the basic editor functions (activate content area, activate toolbar, use Alt-F4 to close editor dialogs, etc.)
changes to editor tools (e.g. insert table) to make them accessible
using standard browser windows to help screen readers (e.g. JAWS).
changing some of the editor dialogs (e.g. image manager) to be easily readable and require only keyboard for navigation.

For more information, check out the resources bellow:

See video

See demo with RadEditor

Coming up in Q3 2009 SP1 - RadEditor thumbnail support

Stoyan Stratev — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:44:25 GMT

One of the cool new features, that will make its way in the Q3 2009 RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX service pack release, is the additional thumbnail option in the Image Manager dialog. When you select an image, that ends with a specific suffix (e.g. "_thumb"), and there is an image with the same name but without the suffix in the current folder, the image dialog will offer the ability to automatically create a link to the original and open it in a new browser window. Here is how this will look like:

We hope that this will provide a much quicker way to do a task that will otherwise require either opening a new Link manager dialog or manually modifying the HTML content. Even though the new features are visible only if you click on an image with a specific suffix, there is a way to turn them off completely via the editor server API:

<telerik:RadEditor ID="RadEditor1" runat="server">

<ImageManager EnableThumbnailLinking="false" ViewPaths="~/" />

</telerik:RadEditor>

Setting EnableThumbnailLinking to false in the Image Manager properties will disable the two new checkboxes altogether.

Introduction to RadRating

Stoyan Stratev — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:53:24 GMT

One of the new controls we added to the Q3 2009 RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite is RadRating. Even though this is the first release of the rating control, we made sure that it is packed full of excellent features and it has the same quality you have come to expect from the Telerik ASP.NET suite - cool skins, wide cross browser support, automated tests, and more.

You can see all of the control's features on its overview page, but I will list some of the major ones here as well: whole item/half item/exact precision; four possible orientations; customizable number of items. Naturally, you can easily combine the new rating controls with other RadControls and quickly create powerful applications. The new online demos for RadControls Q3 2009 feature a Rating and Feedback options on each example page. They were very easily implemented by combining the RadRating and RadToolTip controls with the power of RadXmlHttpPanel for easy communication with the server.

We hope that the new RadRating control will help our customers and be a valuable addition to the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX!

How to Use Google Spellcheck with RadSpell

Stoyan Stratev — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:43:40 GMT

Sometimes the default spellchecking algorithms in RadSpell are not providing the best possible suggestions for misspelled words. For example, the phonetic algorithm works best with English words, but is not very accurate with Russian. The edit distance algorithm is language independent, but will not recognize easy mistakes if the word spelling is not very similar to the original. Unfortunately, implementing your own custom algorithm for a specific language is not an easy task.

The latest Q3 2009 release of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX features a new example for RadSpell, which shows how to use an existing service provided by Google to spellcheck - http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/spell/examples/googlespell/defaultcs.aspx. This example uses a feature of the control that allows using a custom provider (SpellCheckProviderTypeName). The provider needs to implement an existing interface (ISpellCheckProvider) and define simple methods like CheckWord, GetSuggestions, etc.

The Google provider works on the server by making a secure service request to the spell check service, which in turn returns a list of misspelled words and suggestions for them. We then convert this to a format that RadSpell can work with and push it back to the client browser where the actual spell check dialog is displayed. The provider is fully functional with the exception of adding custom words to the dictionary. However, you can easily implement that as well using an example from our Knowledge base - Changing the custom dictionary files location.If you do not need to add custom words, then you can simply copy the Google provider code in your project without the need for any modifications.

New content providers for the RadEditor and RadFileExplorer controls

Stoyan Stratev — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:07:46 GMT

The default content provider, that ships with the editor and file explorer controls will only work with files in the current web application. Naturally, there are scenarios where you wish to show files that are not physically in the application folder. The provider model allows you to do just that - you can either customize the existing provider (FileSystemContentProvider) or write a completely new one (FileBrowserContentProvider).

We recently went through the forums and noted what custom providers are most frequently used with the RadEditor and RadFileExplorer controls. After that we created sample providers for those scenarios and posted them as support resources so people don't have to write them from scratch. Here are the links to those resources:

We hope that these will be useful and will save you some development time. For more information about the content provider model, see the following link - Using a custom FileBrowserContentProvider

Using the RadFileExplorer for ASP.NET AJAX in a MOSS web application

Stoyan Stratev — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:57:35 GMT

The RadFileExplorer is a fairly new control in our ASP.NET AJAX suite and we are happy to see that a lot of people are already adopting it into their solutions. In this post I will show how to make the file explorer work with SharePoint libraries.

By default, the control interfaces with a virtual folder in your web application and allows you to do all kinds of file/folder operations (create new folders, upload/move/delete items, preview, etc.). Unfortunately, the default behavior of the control is limited to virtual folders that can be mapped to physical locations on the server's drives. MOSS web applications use "libraries" to store documents/images and these libraries are only available from the SharePoint database - the files are not stored as physical files on the server, they go in the database instead.

Using the RadFileExplorer in SharePoint web applications will require a new file browser content provider (the logic that connects the file explorer UI to the actual files/folders). Fortunately, we already have such a provider - the RadEditor control uses the RadFileExplorer in its dialogs and we have had a MOSS RadEditor version for some time now. The Editor and FileExplorer controls share the same content provider model. Here are the three steps you need to make to integrate the explorer in a SharePoint web part:

You need to make sure that you have enabled the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions in your MOSS web application - http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/moss-install-aspnet-ajax.html
Next you need to deploy the Telerik.Web.UI assembly in the MOSS server's GAC. This way you can use the RadControls in your site collections - http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/moss-deploying-radcontrols.html
When you add the RadFileExplorer in your web part, you need to set the [RadFileExplorer].Configuration.ContentProviderTypeName property to the SPContentProvider class.

I am attaching a simple SharePoint web part project for Visual Studio 2005, which includes the SPContentProvider class. If you have already done steps 1 and 2 above, you can deploy this project and the FileExplorer web part will show you all libraries in the current site and allow you to interact with them (if you have the required permissions for the libraries of course). I used the 2009.1.527 release of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX to build and test the web part.

FileExplorer_MOSS_WebPart

Integrating RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX with the WIRIS family of products

Stoyan Stratev — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:36:21 GMT

We have received several requests to integrate a formula editor for RadEditor or allow editing of MathML. The wonderful guys at WIRIS(http://www.wiris.com/) have the right tools for this job so we decided to post an example of the WIRIS formula editor and CAS working as RadEditor dialogs.

A couple of words about the formula editor - it uses a Java applet so be sure to have the Java plugin installed in your browser. We used the basic ASPX demo that WIRIS offers as a base for our integration example. The demo can be seen here - http://www.wiris.eu/demo-aspx/pluginwiris/generic/. There are two editors that we converted to dialogs - a formula editor and a CAS (Computer Algebra System). We made a number of changes to the basic demo. and converted it to a proper ASP.NET website using .NET 3.5 (it was originally using .NET 1.0).

Here is a screenshot of the demo:

Here is the download link for the integration example: WIRIS_RadEditor

RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX are now compatible with DotNetNuke 5.0.0

Stoyan Stratev — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:24:13 GMT

At the very end of 2008, the DotNetNuke Corporation released a new major version of their web application framework - DNN 5.0.0. Our modules and skinobject PAs were not compatible with the new release because of a change in DotNetNuke's handling of files and subfolders in the PA archive. With the new RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX service pack release (2008.3.1314), we updated our DNN resources to be compatible with the 5.0.0 installer. The new build of the RadControls modules and skinobjects for DotNetNuke can be used in version 5 and 4 as well. If you find an issue with the RadControls in DNN 5.0, which was not present before you upgraded from 4.X.X , please contact us.

RadRotator for ASP.NET AJAX: Using dynamic templates

Stoyan Stratev — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:43:52 GMT

My colleague Todd Anglin has already written a post about how to create a rotator control dynamically - you can read it here - How to Create RadRotator Programmatically. Unfortunately, this code in that post is for the old RadRotator control and if you try to use it in the new ASP.NET AJAX version, you will notice that it will not compile. Fortunately, you can quickly fix that. Here is what you need to change:

FrameTemplate - this property has been replaced with ItemTemplate

RadRotatorFrame - this object has been replaced with RadRotatorItem

After you update the above names, you should be able to compile and run Todd's code.

Creating a RadRotator control from code is handy in many cases - for example if you are developing a web part or some other server control you wish to easily reuse in your application.

You can can get the updated demo code (C# and VB.NET versions) here:
DynamicRotator

RadRotator binding to XML data

Stoyan Stratev — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:06:40 GMT

As you already know, the upcoming RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 2008 release will add a new control to the suite - the RadRotator. If you are familiar with the RadRotator control from the classic ASP.NET controls suite, you will be glad to know that it is now included in the new Ajax suite as well.

One important change I would like to talk about is how the new rotator works with XML data. The classic rotator control had a property called ContentFile, which allowed the developer to specify a XML file to use as a datasource for the rotator frames. For example:

    <rad:RadRotator id="RadRotator1" runat="server"   
 ContentFile="news.xml" height="100px" width="300px">  
   <FrameTemplate>  
     <div>  
       <%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Title") %>  
     </div>  
   </FrameTemplate>  
 </rad:RadRotator>  
  

The new RadRotator will not have a ContentFile property. Instead, the rotator should be bound to a XmlDataSource control, which in turn will load the XML file. Note that the XmlDataSource control can work with live XML streams (RSS) as well. Here is an example of how the new rotator will work with XML:

   <telerik:RadRotator ID="RadRotator1" ScrollDirection="Up" ScrollDuration="2000"  
 runat="server" DataSourceID="xmlDataSource1" Width="500" Height="200">  
     <ItemTemplate>  
         <div class="module" style="width:500px">  
             <strong><a href='<%# XPath("link") %>' target="_blank">  
                 <%# XPath("title") %>  
             </a></strong>  
             <br />  
             <%# XPath("pubDate") %>  
         </div>  
     </ItemTemplate>  
 </telerik:RadRotator>  
 <asp:XmlDataSource ID="xmlDataSource1" XPath="rss/channel/item" runat="server"  
  DataFile="http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss" />  
  

The above example will bind the rotator to CNN's Top Stories RSS feed. Note that instead of DataBinder.Eval(), the XmlDataSource uses XPath() to get specific items from the data container. This means that if you are upgrading from the classic RadRotator with XML content file, you will need to update your template as well.

RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX in Community Server

Stoyan Stratev — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:59:50 GMT

We have updated the Telerik editor provider for Community Server to use the new RadEditor from the ASP.NET AJAX suite. The new provider is available for download from the following URL - http://blogs.telerik.com/Libraries/Stoyan_Stratev/RadEditorWrapper20080623.sflb?download=true (deployment instructions are included in the archive).

There are some major changes in the new provider. I will list them here:

1. ScriptManager - since the new editor is built on top of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, it requires that the System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly is either in the bin folder of the CommunityServer web site or in the machine's GAC. You do not need to add a ScriptManager control on the pages you plan to use the editor. It will be added automatically (if needed).

2. Resouces folder - the new editor stores most of its resources (dialogs, skins) in the Telerik.Web.UI.dll assembly. However, we still need a RadControls folder in the Community Server provider for several reasons - to store the RadSpell dictionaries, configuration files, etc.

3. Localization - if you want to change the editor language, you need to extract the localization files (.resx) in the App_GlobalResources folder in your CS website.

As always, we would appreciate your feedback/suggestions for improving the provider.

Full-featured RadEditor for MOSS 5.0

Stoyan Stratev — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:35:39 GMT

Our RadEditor for MOSS product has reached version 5.0. There are some major changes that you should know before you upgrade from version 4.x. First and most important is that the 5.0 version uses RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX. The new editor offers many improvements over the previous RadEditor for ASP.NET, too many to list here. Check the product page for more details. This is a major upgrade and it means that you will need to have the WSS v3/MOSS 2007 Service Pack 1 and ASP.NET AJAX installed in your web farm.

The second important change is in the RadEditor features. There are still two features in the "Site Features" page, but their meaning is different. The first feature will activate the editor in all lists in the current site. In the new version this feature activates the editor for all browsers, while in 4.x we had a separate feature for Internet Explorer. The other feature will activate the editor for all publishing HTML fields on the site (WCM scenario). This is the same as using SharePoint designer to replace all editors in your publishing layouts, but it does not actually change the pages (i.e. the pages will still contain the original editor declaration - <PublishingWebControls:RichHtmlField... />). It is up to the SharePoint developer to decide whether to replace the original editor with SharePoint designer, or using our feature.

Upgrading from version 4.x is a simple process. We have outlined the steps in the online documentation - http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/upgrade-instructions-from-v4-to-v5.html. Speaking of which, the documentation for the new editor has been moved in the main RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX help, so you can access it online from http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/moss-introduction.html.

The new RadEditor for MOSS 5.0 is available from the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX downloads page. Note that the LITE version of the editor has not been updated to 5.0. It will remain in the 4.x branch and will be updated only with bugfixes - no new features will be added to version 4.x.

Finally, you can see a simple page with the MOSS content editor web part on our SharePoint demo site - http://sharepoint.telerik.com/Products/RadControlsAjax/Pages/RadEditorfor.aspx

The New RadControls Installer

Stoyan Stratev — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:26:13 GMT

We have been using the same old installer for a very long time. The reason for that is very simple - because it worked. However, with the release of the new RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax suite we felt that it is time for a change. The people who tried our new futures build for Q1 2008 already know what I am talking about - the Prometheus controls come with a totally redesigned installation experience.

There were two main issues we wanted to address - install/uninstall speed and the look & feel of the installation wizard. I am happy to say that we achieved success on both accounts. The installer went from this (click to open in a new window):

to this (click to open in a new window):

The new installation wizard gives you even more options when you want to do a custom install - you can choose whether or not to install the examples, Visual Studio integration, or the documentation. A lot has been changed under the hood as well - the install/uninstall process now takes only a couple of minutes (several times faster than the old installer).

Try the new RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax build tell us what you think. There are still a few weeks left until the official release and your feedback will be appreciated.

More information about the futures build as well as download instructions are available in our fourms - http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/thread/b311D-bcmkaa.aspx