Now that the calendar will soon flip to 2007, I inevitably started musing over 2006... What a great year it was for telerik - the ASP.NET UI product line evolved quite a bit, the new Windows Forms UI suite and Reporting products were revealed, we successfully organized a strong community event, the vibrant telerik community continued to grow, we brought to life some really creative commercials, the telerik.com site was enriched with many new features and resources... I started this blog post with the idea to talk in detail about the things we managed (and didn't manage)  to do during the past year...

As I said in my previous blog post, the three ingredients needed for a good Vista-like applications are known... But this begs the question - what does telerik do about it? May be you'll find the answer in our latest Q4 2006 release. Specifically for the WinForms controls we've improved quite a lot the RibbonBar control (ScreenTips, KeyTips, Gallery, etc.), we've introduced scaling for all of the framework element / items, we've added a new control (r.a.d.panelbar) and the docking controls now support MDI.

A picture is worth a thousand words so here are some screenshots of the examples which we have...

I’ve recently completed my certification (ah, thanks, you’re too kind!) and a lot of people have been asking me what’s the deal with all the new .NET 2.0 credentials. I will try to answer those questions in the following blog post.

For those among you who don’t already know Microsoft has reorganized their certification system. In the .NET 1.x world there were two recognizable certifications that could interest professional developers like us: MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) and MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer). The MCAD certification was aimed at regular developers who could choose to specialize in either windows forms or web applications....

The first CTP of WPF/E is official and it rocks!

If I were Steve Ballmer I would shout: Designers, designers, designers, designers, designers.... Why designers? May be because as a developer (or at least that's how I consider my mindset) I miss too much WPF features in WPF/E at the moment, starting from the handy, nice layouts. I hope someone from the telerik UX team will try it and share his/her experience to the reading public.

Btw, there're new Expression tools (announced as Expression Studio) so expect some blog posts from the people who make our site and products look so nice.

Today's...

The last time I've heard something about WPF/e was at the Mix conference this year in Las Vegas. Because of all the noise around WPF, and some really good community sites which started showing up and were mostly dedicated to WPF, I almost forgot about WPF/e.
 
Several days ago I searched about WPF/e and found a blog post by Joe Stegman who says that an external CTP is expected to be released soon. I've been waiting for quite some time to put my hands on WPF/e and see exactly what are its limitations comparing it to its big brother - WPF. I...

There's a telerik contest going on. The requirements are simple - you have to prepare a small app using our WinForms controls and fill in a survey. We've already started receiving participants' applications and I'm really amazed how quickly people get used to our controls, and especially how fast they've learned to use the Visual Style Builder application (the application which helps you create a theme and style each telerik Windows Forms UI control).

We'll be offering three iPods as 3rd prizes, an Xbox 360 as the second prize, and the winner will get a fabulous 4 day trip to Hawaii! Why Hawaii? Well, there's...

A month ago I blogged about the WPF conversion contest. The blog discussed creating a tool which converts files from some other formats (3DS, SWF, etc.) to XAML. Back then I said that my personal favorite - a tool which converts a flash file to XAML - is missing. Several days later Mike Swanson emailed me and told me that he himself is actually working on such a tool. A month later, this tool is a fact! I can't say anything else than "Great work, Mike". My personal favorite is not missing any more:)
 
Zhivko from the telerik UX team gave me 3...

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to all US readers!

I guess the holiday is a good occasion to announce a new feature we added to our ASP.NET grid control - Search Engine Optimized paging is finally ready. The grid will handle automatically crawlers and a special pager will be initialized in this case. The good news are the this feature can be turned on/off explicitly using PagerStyle.EnableSEOPaging and page indexes will be persisted via query strings even in multiple grids on the same page.

Live example can be found @ http://betas.telerik.com/examples/seopaging/

Cheers,
Vlad ...

My team released the first Service Pack for the Windows Forms UI controls several hours ago. I wouldn't be blogging about a Service Pack if it weren’t for some major improvements we made over the last few weeks. Traditionally we’ve shied away from adding new capabilities in Service Packs but rules are there to be broken and you will be seeing lots of new stuff and improvements with every SP, minor or major telerik r.a.d.controls for WinForms release.

The highlight of the SP1 additions is the significantly improved design-time experience. The changes were driven by the feedback we have received from...

Today I had some strange experience.  I have been hunting a strange bug that caused something to be placed in the ASP.NET session at a time that it was not supposed to be.  My biggest problem was finding out who was putting an object in the session and what that object actually contained.

I already knew that the HttpSessionState instance was being stored in the current HttpContext's Items collection (thanks to Mr. Lutz Roeder, of course), and my initial plan was to inherit from HttpSessionState and intercept the calls made to methods like Add, Remove, etc.  Alas, HttpSessionState is marked as...