[Cross posted from Telerik Watch]

Smell that? That's a freshly baked release from Telerik that's just about ready to "officially" launch. The Q2 2009 release is one of the biggest releases in Telerik's history, again delivering simultaneous updates to all 7 Telerik product lines at one time. An update of this scale is bound to have lots new and interesting stuff, and we can't wait to put it in your hands so you can start playing with it. The official launch of Q2 2009 is Monday, July 6th, and to help you jump-off with the new bits and ...

In a recent webinar, I showed an example of how you can build a superior user experience in an ASP.NET website by using RadChart for Silverlight. The Telerik Silverlight chart has animations, rich rendering, and is much more visual appealing than the “static” RadChart for ASP.NET. But while the Silverlight chart is a great way to enhance data visualizations in your ASP.NET site, how do you handle users that don’t have Silverlight installed?

One approach is to implement “graceful degradation.” Graceful degradation is an important and familiar principle in web design, and essentially it means this: if you build ...

I recently showed you how to get started working with the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX on Azure. It’s really a lot easier than you might think. If you missed the first two posts (and the follow-up videos), here they are for quick reference:

RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX on Azure

Deploying RadControls to Azure

Azure Videos on Telerik TV

Today, I updated the live running Telerik demo on Azure to feature the complete Telerik Web Mail demo! That means you can now see almost all of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX running live on the Azure Cloud. Included in the ...

If you followed my posts last week, you learned that the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX are “cloud ready.” You can take the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX that you know and love today and confidently use them in Cloud Service applications that target the Microsoft Azure cloud environment. In case you missed those posts, you can catch-up now:

RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX on Azure

Deploying RadControls to Azure

I’m happy to relay that the videos that are related to these blog posts are now both available on Telerik TV for your immediate viewing pleasure. Each video illustrates the concepts ...

A very important question recently crossed my inbox, and it essentially asked:

“Can you design and build Enterprise-grade n-tier applications with OpenAccess? Or does it force you violate principles of good multi-tier application design to make the ORM features work?”

It was a great question and I was surprised to find that there is not more info in the online docs to address this. So, to help everyone benefit from this question’s answer, here are some details about building n-tier applications with OpenAccess.

WHAT DOES GOOD N-TIER ARCHITECTURE LOOK LIKE WITH OPENACCESS?

Let me preface this discussion by saying there ...

If you’ve spent much time visiting “web 2.0” sites, you know that large font sizes are totally “in vogue” for data entry forms. Not only are they easy for all audiences to read, but they also imply a certain level of simplicity on a website. In fact, there are even some UX experts suggesting larger font sizes are better now that high-resolution monitors are the norm and not the exception.

If you’ve got a “beautifully designed” web 2.0-style site, though, and you’re working with RadInput, you know that the default skins “force” their own font size. What do you do ...

In the first part of this short series covering the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX in the cloud, I showed you how you could quickly (and easily) start a new Azure Cloud Service project, add the RadControls, and then debug the project locally. The next step, of course, is taking that locally built and debugged project and deploying it to the “real” cloud fabric, hosted by Microsoft in their data center (not yet data centers…). That is where the rubber meets the proverbial road and we find out if the Telerik RadControls are really “cloud ready.”

HOW DO YOU DEPLOY ...

Those of you paying attention to “conference news” are probably aware of Microsoft’s entrance in to the cloud computing space via their platform code-named “Windows Azure.”  This version of “Windows in the cloud” essentially makes it possible to easily build and deploy .NET web applications to Microsoft’s hosted cloud infrastructure. The benefits of deploying your application to the cloud are (potentially) many, but I am going to assume you are already aware of the key “selling points” (such as scalability, scalability, and…oh yeah, scalability).

TELERIK IS CLOUD READY

I’m pleased to report that Telerik is “Cloud Ready.” This ...

A few weeks ago, I showed you how you can use the new RadCompression HttpModule found in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2008 SP2 (and later) to easily (as in, automatically) compress your Ajax and JSON web service communication. While that technique is great for improving the performance of modern web apps that do lots of processing client-side, that’s not the only thing RadCompression can do. It can also automatically compress ViewState! This week, I’ll show you how you can quickly enable ViewState compression and show you the effects it has on overall ViewState size and server performance.

HOW ...

Here’s a quick tip for those of you using RadAjaxManager and RadAjaxManagerProxy. The scenario:

You have a MasterPage with a RadAjaxManager and a ContentPage with a RadAjaxManagerProxy (so far, so good, and you’re following Telerik’s best practice guidance). All declarative Ajax settings work fine with the Proxy- no trouble. But now you want fire an Ajax event on your ContentPage manually using JavaScript and handle the AjaxRequest event on the server. You’re shocked to discover there is no “AjaxRequest” event for the RadAjaxManagerProxy! What’s the solution?

Fortunately, the solution is easy. The RadAjaxManagerProxy is designed to make ...