RadFormDecorator might be one of the lesser-known controls in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite, yet it is a control that can eliminate much of the hassle and greatly reduce the time needed for completing the look and feel of a Web solution. What the control does is decorate elements that are usually rendered by the browser, such as buttons, checkboxes, radiobuttons, fieldsets, etc.

It just so happens that this product can be used for free - as it is one of the goodies that Telerik provides for the whole ASP.NET community out there!

As of Q2 2009, the RadFormDecorator will feature a new - ...

As I wrote in the following much commented post when the Q1 2009 beta was released - RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX did receive a major face-lift!

 

Despite the major improvements in a number of important areas, this change has caused turmoil as well (somewhat regrettably for both sides - customers and Telerik developers - involved).

After the release, two major requests came from customers: 1) to help them keep an "old-style" skin in their applications as they liked it more than the new version, as well as 2) help them update their existing custom skins.

I spent the last ...

lifting (noun)

1. Face-lifting or face-lift is the plastic surgery for tightening facial tissues and improving the facial appearance.

Q1 2009 Beta. RadControls just underwent a serious “surgical” intervention, cutting deep into the skin – removing excess CSS, streamlining look & feel across controls, adding transparent .PNG to replace .GIFs, you name it. For a taste of things to come, here is a link to our new Web Mail demo, and its source. You can also check the screenshots below.

 

Two complete skins were rolled out for the beta – namely a brand new (and color neutral) Default...

The ImageEditor dialog in RadEditor has been around for about half a year, providing much wanted common image editing capabilities to the editor's end users.

 

 

 This dialog in fact is the front-end of a basic image editing engine that has been built into the Telerik.Web.UI.dll. Some time ago our colleague Todd Anglin suggested that we make the API public so it can be used independent of the editor. Sounded like a good idea - and the coming Q3 2008 will allow you to take advantage of it :)

 And since the functionality is already available in the already ...

One of the things one needs to take care of when converting an existing application to use MS AJAX is inline script blocks inside pages or user controls. Problem with these is that if the control is sent to the client as a result of a partial page update (e.g. AJAX call) the inline script block simply won’t execute at all.

The problem is caused by the way MS AJAX and browsers work.

When an UpdatePanel is to replace its old content with newly received AJAX content, it deletes the old content and then uses innerHTML to inject the new ...

Summary

 

The technique demonstrates how to transform a non-AJAX scenario which adds a CSS <link> tag to the head of the page to work with AJAX, using a client-side javascript function to register the  <link>.

Using AJAX in an application is probably the standard now. Partial page rendering offers a number of benefits such as increased page responsiveness, as well as close-to-desktop experience using AJAX-based toolkits such as RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

However, adding UpdatePanels to the page and expecting that all of your “postback” logic will continue to function without changes is only true for simple scenarios. ...

If I had to summarize what the RadFormDecorator control is about in a single sentence, it would be:
The RadFormDecorator aims to unload yet another task from the "regular Joe" developer by reducing the need for styling elements on the page.

Enter RadControls

Telerik RadControls provide a great deal of rich UI controls allowing a developer to build web-based applications that resemble the richness of a desktop application. The majority of controls provided in the suite do not have direct analogs provided by the browser - e.g. RadEditor, RadGrid, etc. There are also a number of controls that can be used to ...

The following blog post was written together with Rumen Jekov, who is the most experienced support officer at Telerik and has been supporting RadEditor for a number of years now. If you are a RadEditor user, and you contact us, chances are you will be receiving an answer from him.

The blog post discusses the accessibility features of RadEditor. While accessibility options were not considered important couple of years ago, things have changed - and will be changing even more in the future. For enterprize customers and governmental institutions accessibility is becoming a top priority, and we have gone at great lengths ...