The Q2 2011 release of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX brings in two novelties in regard to the skins organization:

• New skins assembly is introduced (Telerik.Web.UI.Skins)
• The “skins chooser” is reworked and is much more friendly

What is Default Skin?

The default skin is declared in the web.config file of the project. This is the global site-wide skin to be used by the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. However it can be overwritten by each control via its Skin property or by the whole page by using the RadSkinManager.

What is Telerik.Web.UI.Skins?

The Telerik.Web.UI.Skins is an assembly that contains some new skins. The old skins are still placed in the Telerik.Web.UI assembly. In the long term we plan to extract all skins but the "Default" one from the main (Telerik.Web.UI) assembly. The main goal is to optimize the referenced assemblies, i.e. only sites that use any custom skins should reference the Telerik.Web.UI.Skins.

How to configure the skin references of a project?

Here is a screenshot of the new Project Configuration wizard:

On the first step you can choose which Skin packs (skin pack is an assembly which contains one or more skins) to be ...

When creating our Visual Studio Extensions, accelerating development with our components has been the number one goal. One of the VS Extensions’ core components is the Upgrade Wizard. The task it was designed to fulfill is making the mundane job of updating your projects faster and easier.

As the Upgrade Wizard has been in the wild for quite some time now, we’ve received a lot of feedback from customers using our various products. Even though it has been doing a pretty good job, there is always room for improvement. The two most popular feature requests were:

• Add support for upgrading Class Library projects
• Add support for upgrading multiple projects

We are happy to let you know, both are available in our new Upgrade Wizard.

Lets use the brand new RadControls for Windows Phone Visual Studio Extensions to show off the improved Upgrade Wizard.

Say you have a simple solution with a couple of Windows Phone projects and you want to upgrade it. Most of them use RadControls for Windows Phone, some do not.

I will start the Upgrade Wizard through the Telerik menu, (2 clicks)

select the latest and greatest version I have on my machine, (3 clicks so far)...

Introduced with the 2011 Q2 Release of the RadControls for AJAX, WinForms, WPF and Silverlight is the new Toolbox Grouping functionality. Controls in the toolbox will be delivered in multiple tabs, organized by type and role, right after installation.

 

 

New Toolbox Look	Old Look

 

The users of the Toolbox Configurator wizard will also benefit from the improvement. For those who aren’t familiar, it can be found under the Visual Studio Telerik menu. Using the toolbox configurator will add the items in the toolbox organized in groups, although the old ‘one-tab’ look will still apply for previous releases.

If you find it hard to keep up with all the items in your Visual Studio Toolbox you may have taken the time to sort them manually. You no longer have to to do this chore. It is high time Telerik did this for you, as we are always striving to improve your developer experience.

 

Happy Coding!

Teodor

The Telerik VSXTeam

We are happy to let you know that Telerik released new Visual Studio Extension for RadControls for Windows Phone 7 Q2 2011. This means VSX Team now supports Visual Studio Extensions for all Telerik UI Components!

If you create Windows Phone 7 applications using the new Visual Studio Extension everything will be configured automatically for you. If you want to install new version you don’t need to browse with hours any more just use Upgrade Wizard and it will find latest version and download it.

Now I will give you more detailed information on how to use this new Visual Studio Extension for Windows Phone 7.

Create New Project

Let’s start with the creation of a new Telerik Project - you will find our project templates in the standard New Project dialog:

When you choose one of the project templates the New Project Wizard gets started. It allows to choose Windows Phone Settings. It is composed of two pages.

On the first page you can change the Telerik assembly references of the project. The dependent assemblies will be checked/unchecked automatically.

On the second page you can change your Project type and whether do you want to add ...

A customer of ours faced a very interesting issue we were able to solve earlier today.

The problem was that when Visual Studio run under the context of his account, all the Telerik VSExtensions were available in the Extension Manager. On the other hand, when Visual Studio run as a different user, the Telerik WebUI VSExtensions were missing.

The problem is very likely to happen if you run Visual Studio under different accounts to test your applications with limited permissions. It happens when you usually install the Telerik VSExtensions through the installer and you decide to install a newer version through the Extension Manager:

The reason is that the RadControls installers deploy the VSExtensions “as admin”, e.g. the extensions get unpacked under the [VisualStudioInstallDir]\Common7\IDE\Extensions folder (typically C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions) and the Extension Manager unpacks them under the %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions one.

It is important to note here that the VSIX packages of the Telerik VSExtensions for Visual Studio 2010 are equally the same: we get the packages and upload them to the Visual Studio Online Gallery after the build. The difference is only in the execution of the VSIXInstaller (the tool, responsible for the unpacking ...

Tired of enabling installer packages with User Account Control turned on? Miss the right-click & Run as Administrator command on MSI files? Want to easily run each installer with logging enabled?

At least I was. Here is a quick way to add a Run As Administrator With Log command to msi files (inspired by David Ebbo’s post):

All we need is modify the MSI.Package class definition in the registry.

    The first step is to add a “runas” shell entry. This allows the command to automatically be run as administrator.

    The next step is defining a command to be executed. This is the tricky part, because for flexibility our command needs to be of the REG_EXPAND_SZ type. The latter means that any system shortcuts such as %appdata%, %systemroot%, %windir%, etc. will automatically get resolved. Thus, a simple command such as:

"%SystemRoot%\System32\msiexec.exe" /i "%1" /limev "%1.log"

 
needs to be defined in binary format, i.e.:

@=hex(2):22,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
  00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,6d,00,\
  73,00,69,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,63,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,22,00,20,00,2f,\
  00,69,00,20,00,22,00,25,00,31,00,22,00,20,00,2f,00,6c,00,69,00,6d,00,65,00,\
  76,00,20,00,22,00,25,00,31,00,2e,00,6c,00,6f,00,67,00,22,00,00,00

Here is the full content of the regfile I used:

 ...

1st click, 2nd click and you are ready to go. These are the steps required to install any Telerik product as of the Q1 2011 release. The idea behind this change is to provide better user experience during installation. To achieve this we have minimized the steps that you have to perform when installing any Telerik product while at the same time we have left the same flexibility to customize what is installed.

Let me introduce the new installation workflow:

Step 1

On the first dialog you can read the license agreement of the product if you click the Read License Agreement button. By continuing to the next step you agree to this license agreement.

Step 2

On the second dialog you can see what components are selected for installation and what the target installation location is. You can perform custom selection by clicking on the Customize button. If you prefer default installation then you can simply click on the Install button and the installation process will start.

We are really excited about the improved installation experience and hope you like it too. We will be glad to hear about your impression so don’t hesitate to share it with us....

As you have probably heard starting with the official Q1 2011 release our AJAX components will provide integrated VS 2010 MSHelp3 documentation.

Since the release a couple of customers have reported that they are not able to install the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. It turned out that the problem was related to the deployment of the MS Help 3 documentation. As a result we identified two different reasons for the failure. Both are described in the current blog post.

First I want to show you how to recognize installation failure caused by the documentation deployment. To do so you have to examine the Application Event Log using the Event Viewer. You need to search for error logged by the HelpLibManager application.

Here are the different failing scenarios:

Unable to initialize the local help library

This error occurs when the User Account Control (UAC) on the machine is turned ON. The reason is that the process of deploying the documentation is not granted with the required permissions. This issue have been fixed and shouldn’t happen any more. I will list the possible solutions:

Solution 1:

1. Download the RadControls installer again
2. Run the RadControls installer

Solution 2:

1. Start a Command Prompt ...

In the previous post we discussed how you could quickly create a new Visual Studio project, configured to use the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC targeting ASP.NET MVC 3. In this one, we are going to talk about how our Visual Studio Extensions have improved in regards to ASP.NET MVC 3 and the Razor view engine.

A significant amount of the settings the Project Configuration Wizard manages are applied to your master page. In cases where an appropriate master page has not been found, you will be prompted to create a new one:

If your project targets ASP.NET MVC 3, you will be offered an additional choice for your preferred view engine. Depending on you choice, you will receive either an ASPX master page, named Site.master

or if you select the Razor view engine, a layout page named _Layout.cshtml(vbhtml).

Needless to say all of the choices you make will be applied in either case.

Some of you might have decided to use both view engines, because you do not want to rewrite all of your views, but don’t want to miss out on the new goodness that is Razor, If that is your case, ...

Earlier this week we released Q3 Service Pack 1 of the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. The release has a full support for ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM. A change we introduced is the new Visual Studio Project Templates for creating new Telerik MVC 3 project. Using these Project Templates you can create new MVC 3 project configured to use the Telerik Extensions for MVC in seconds with just a few clicks. The Project Templates for Telerik MVC project can be reached either from the File | New menu or from the Telerik | MVC UI Extensions menu.

The New Project dialog will be launched in both scenarios. For convenience and better discoverability there are multiple entry points for creating new Telerik MVC 3 project. Here are all possible choices:

Telerik Node

Here you can find four different Project Templates for new Telerik MVC 3 project targeting both the Web Forms view engine and the new Razor view engine and both for C# and for Visual Basic.

Language Specific Node (Visual C# / Visual Basic)

Two Project Templates exist under both Visual C# and Visual Basic nodes – one that targets Web ...

I guess the larger part of you have to maintain various projects using different versions of a Telerik suite, let’s say RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

Having in mind the above mentioned scenario, working with two projects referring different versions of the Telerik.Web.UI assembly there are the following options :

1. Have parallel installs of both the RadControls versions on your machine.
   This one works fine until one day, while in a hurry, you just expand a RadControls group in your Toolbox, drag a control over your page, attempt to build the project and find it broken. The reason for the break is that you unintentionally dragged a control from the wrong Toolbox group and Visual Studio got the project reference changed to point to the “other” Telerik.Web.UI assembly.
   In addition, the embedded filtering in VS2010 hides the “older” toolbox items, so you don’t see the older assembly version. Which makes it hard to drag a control from the “older” assembly to your page/form/window.
2. Have only the latest RadControls installed and declare the controls in your old project by code.
   This is a really good one when one wants to learn the API of a control suite, but ...

As you may already know we officially released the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC Q2 2010. In addition to all the new features with this new release we shipped the Telerik MVC Visual Studio Extensions. With the aid of the VS Extensions you will find it really easy to create new Telerik MVC project, convert an existing project to a Telerik one, configure and upgrade your project to a newer version of the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. With the release of MVC VS Extensions the VSXTeam@Telerik achieved one bigger goal – we now support VS Extensions for all Telerik UI Components! This in turn means that users benefit the same user experience when they integrate our UI components into their projects :).

I will now give you some more details on how to use the VS Extensions and what they can do for you.

Create New Project

Let’s start with the creation of a new Telerik Project - you will find our project templates in the standard New Project dialog:

When you choose one of the project templates the New Project Wizard gets started. It has two pages: one for project wide options and one for ...

Or the quickest way to acquire and start utilizing RadControls

Okay, I’m throwing it out: With Visual Studio 2010 on your machine and a Telerik account, you can set up a project utilizing the latest RadControls in less than two minutes.

Here is how:

• Start Visual Studio 2010
• Launch the Extension Manager and navigate to the Online Gallery tab
• Search for Telerik VSExtensions
  
• Install the VSExtensions you’re interested in. For the time being there are four of them: WebUI (RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX), Silverlight (RadControls for Silverlight), WPF (RadControls for WPF) and WinForms (RadControls for WinForms). VSExtensions for ASP.NET MVC are in production and will be published to the Visual Studio Online Gallery with the official release of the Telerik UI Extensions for ASP.NET MVC
• Restart Visual Studio (the VSExtensions consist of a VS Integration Package and need a restart)
• Start the Add New Project dialog from Visual Studio and select the Telerik project you prefer:
  
• Hit the Download button from the New Project Wizard, enter your Telerik credentials and download the newest RadControls distribution
   
• Follow the wizard to get your project created, click Finish and voilla: there’s ...

At Telerik we take great pride in having the most comprehensible component suites on the market. We always strive to make our components easier and more pleasant to work with. When we first released the Visual Studio Extensions, we made a commitment to make being successful with our components as easy as possible.

Here are some of my favorite new features:

Keeping up to date

In the past we offered a possibility to upgrade your existing projects using the latest versions available through our website. In addition to that functionality, we now let you check for new versions whenever you are about to manage your RadControls related project references. In that way you can always be certain that the version you are currently using is the latest and greatest.

Let’s say you want to create a new project, powered by the latest version of RadControls, which you haven’t been able to download yet. Here is how it’s done:

1. Open the New Project dialog, just as you would, when creating any other project
   
2. Select one of the Telerik Project Templates
   
3. Click the Download button in the Project Configuration Wizard
   
4. Input your credentials and click Log in
    
5. Wait for the download ...

Some of you already noticed new versions of RadControls are available on the Telerik website and were able to download them to their machines.

There is nothing to worry about – it is just the official Q2 2010 release coming out: we are in the final release phase and the official news are about to come in an hour or so.

In other words, having the VSExtensions added to your IDE not only eases the RadControls project creation/configuration/upgrade, but from time to time can give you an hour or two heads-up with the newly expected release.

If you just can’t wait for the new releases (like yours truly), just go get the VSExtensions installed to your VS2010 through the Visual Studio Online Gallery.

Cheers,

Erjan Gavalji

The Telerik VSXTeam

With the VSIX deployment in Visual Studio 2010 the world become a better place for developers – we are now able to add small tools to our IDEs and customize them the way we want with just a few megs of download from the Online Gallery. If we don’t use the tool for some time and we don’t want it to eat some of our PC resources we can just disable it through the Extension Manager. If we don’t like a tool we can simply remove it. The VSIX deployment guarantees that a tool is uninstallable, as the deployment is just an xcopy operation. Even if the IDE fails with the uninstall, we can use Windows Explorer, navigate to the Extensions folder (either %appdata%\..\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions folder, or [vsinstalldir]\Common7\IDE\Extensions folder).

There is a new entry in the Visual Studio Online Gallery, Telerik.Web.UI.VSPackage for some time now, which was recently renamed to Telerik WebUI VSExtensions. By the time of the rename, three new packages were added – Telerik Silverlight VSExtensions, Telerik WPF VSExtensions and Telerik WinForms VSExtensions.
These are all the updated versions of the specific Visual Studio Extensions for RadControls -  the composition of Telerik RadControls ...

You've probably already heard about the CDN support of RadScriptManager and RadStyleSheetManager (part of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite).

Removing the need to manually edit the web.config file, the Project Management Wizard (started through the Telerik -> RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX > Convert to Telerik Project/Configure WebSite menu) now allows you to define if you want to enable or disable CDN support for each of the controls globally (website wide).

In a manner, similar to the global skin, CDN support can be enabled/disabled at control level, overriding the global setting in the web.config file. All you need is use the CDNSettings property and set its TelerikCdn attribute to the desired value. The control-dependent page templates support this setting as well:

So why would you need to wait anymore, just grab the new release, upgrade your projects and utilize CDN support!

Cheers,

the Telerik VSXTeam

The Telerik Visual Studio Extensions are now included in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and RadControls for Silverlight installers in order to make the development of applications with Telerik RadControls faster and easier.

The main entry point for the Visual Studio Extensions is the Telerik menu. It is context sensitive and changes its state depending on the projects you are working on.

1) Create New Telerik Project menu item

This state can be observed when no solution is opened or the currently selected project is not suitable for use with RadControls.

Using the Create New Telerik Project menu item you can create a new Telerik Project with the provided New Project Templates.

2) Convert to Telerik Project menu item, other menu items disabled

This state can be observed when the currently selected project is suitable for use with RadControls and it has no reference to RadControls or that reference is broken.

Using the Convert to Project menu item you can:

• Telerik-Enable your application (add references to the RadControls assemblies)
• Fix your broken references

3) Upgrade Wizard, Configure Project and Add RadControls Template menu items

This state can be observed when the currently selected project has a working reference ...

Developers (yours truly included) often hate it when there is a need to deal with an external tool to accomplish a simple task. The upgrade process of RadControls seems such a task – you need to start a browser, open the Telerik website, login to your account, navigate to the Downloads section, download the installer and run it. Even more - if you want to keep updated you need to either check your RSS reader or e-mail, or refresh the Downloads page when you’re eagerly waiting for a new version.

One of the new features in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and RadControls for Silverlight installations for the Q3 release is the auto-upgrade utility provided by the Visual Studio Extensions. We added a special webservice in the Telerik website to support that.

One of the aspects of the auto-upgrades is the automatic check for a new available version. The check happens once a day when you open a RadControls Web Application in your Visual Studio. See for yourself:

The other aspect is the retrieval of the actual new version. Once you are notified that a new version is detected, you need to just provide your ...

To enable support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 you will need to select “Complete” when installing RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 2009 SP1

One cool new feature of Visual Studio 2010 is that snippets now work in the HTML editor. Code snippets for C# and VB have been supported in previous versions of Visual Studio, however the new HTML Snippets feature gives you the same productivity boost when writing markup or ASP.NET server control declarations in the HTML Editor.

The following procedure describe how to use RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX code snippets:

• In Visual Studio 2010, on the File menu, point to New and then click Project. Doing this displays the New Project dialog box.
• Select a project type, such as Telerik > Web > RadControls C#  Web Application.
• In the upper-left corner of the New Project dialog box, click the combo box and select .NET Framework 3.5. Click OK and then continue to create your project.

• In the Code Editor, place the cursor where you would like to insert the code snippet.
• Type the shortcut for the code snippet that you want to add to your code.

• Type TAB, TAB to ...