Welcome back to my ongoing series on optimizing the Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. For those that are counting, this is the fifth installment in the series, so if you've missed the first four parts I suggest you go back and read them now. This article builds on some of the concepts we've covered previously, so a sound understanding of the earlier concepts is a plus. And before you get confused, you won't find the other installments on blogs.telerik.com. Up to now, this series has been running on my popular Telerik Watch blog, but going forward all installments ...

Hello all! It has been quite a while since I last posted on the official Telerik Blogs. The reasons and excuses range from technical problems to unbelievable busyness, but I won't bore you with them here. What is important is that I've restored my connectivity to the Telerik Blogs and I fully intend to begin making regular updates here in the future. If you purged this blog from your feed readers in my absence, be sure to re-add it so you won't miss a thing.

In the mean time, while I haven't been active on these blogs, I haven't been ...

On Monday, I showed you some the new settings in RadGrid 5 the enable you to control certain aspects exported PDFs. We looked at how you can easily set the PDF's metadata, change its filename, and even control the PDF's security settings. All of these settings- along with the ability to force the PDF to open in a new window- can be set with a single property in the Grid's new ExportSettings configuration block. What we didn't look at on Monday is how you can control the formatting of your exported PDFs. Today we'll take a look at how you ...

By now you probably know that one of the biggest new features in RadGrid 5.0 is support for export to PDF. For quite some time, RadGrid has supported direct export to Microsoft Word and Excel formats, but the addition of PDF export elevates the Grid's exporting capabilities to unprecedented levels. Using the new export feature couldn't be easier. As with previous export formats, all that is required is a call to a single simple RadGrid method:

this.RadGrid1.MasterTableView.ExportToPdf();

When you call this method, all of the data in the Grid is exported to a new PDF that the users can then save ...

For months now we have been talking about the new RadEditor being built in the "Prometheus" suite and how it is going to be the best version of RadEditor to date. Today an early preview of that work was released in the "Prometheus" Futures build and made available for general testing in the Telerik community. Obviously, the version that was released today looks a lot different from the final version that will be released- dialogs are still rough, features are unpolished, and some features are missing- but it is still a great look at what's coming.

Today I ran the RadEditor ...

Have you ever thought about processing credit cards in your .NET application? If you have, then you know one of the first things you need to do is find some code to validate that credit card numbers entered by your users appear correct before you send them along to your payment processor. Having created applications in the past that process credit cards, I know that this task can be surprisingly harder than it should be. There are plenty of code snippets scattered across the 'Nets that show you how to do individual parts of the validating process, but there are few ...

It recently came to my attention that there is no good documentation on the Telerik website showing you how to create a RadRotator (with a defined template) programmatically. There is some documentation out there showing you how to programmatically data bind a RadTicker, and the RadControls Learning Guide has some good guidance, but nothing exists online for easy Rotator reference. Let's solve that problem and take a quick look at how you can programmatically create your RadRotator and template.

Step 1: Define your template
Defining a template for RadRotator in code is very similar to the process involved in ...

Have you ever been working with the Telerik Quickstart examples and wondered why all of the demo pages inherit from XhtmlPage instead of System.Web.UI.Page? Even if you guess that this custom base page somehow ensures that all rendered demo pages are XHTML valid, have you ever wondered how the base page manages to deliver that functionality? In this post, we’ll take a close look at the XhtmlPage class and see what it’s doing to deliver easy XHTML validity. The lessons learned from this class can easily be applied to your own custom page classes and used to make your web ...

In our final look at the RadControls for ASP.NET running on an iPhone, we'll look at RadSplitter, RadTabStrip, RadToolBar, RadTreeView, RadUpload, and RadWindow. In the first two installments of this series we looked at the other 12 RadControls running on the phone and found most of them to be usable or semi-usable. So far, only RadEditor has earned an unusable rating on the iPhone's mobile Safari. Today we'll pass judgement on the remaining RadControls and then create a quick summary chart that you can reference during your future iPhone development.

So without further delay, here's how the final six controls fared:...

In part one of this three part series, we looked at RadAjax, RadCalendar, RadChart, RadCombobox, RadDock, and RadEditor running on the iPhone. We found most of those controls run relatively well on the iPhone with the exception of RadEditor. In this second installment, we'll look at another batch of RadControls and pass judgement on their usability. Each control will be deemed either usable, semi-usable, or unusable on the iPhone so that you can quickly tweak your applications (or build new ones) for iPhone users.

Today's lucky controls are RadGrid, RadInput, RadMenu, RadPanelbar, RadRotator, and RadSpell. During all of my tests with these ...