Building a website in 40 hours, Part 2

In part 1, we looked at how you lay a solid foundation for building a website on a very tight timeline. Planning, no matter how long you have to work, should not be “skimped” on.

Mapping requirements to deliverables with tools in mind

Requirements communicate what your client or charity want to be able to do with their website. As a web developer, you have a few choices for how you go about turning those requirements in to a schedule of work for your team. You can:

1. Build everything by hand, delivering only exactly what is defined in the requirements
2. Use tools and services to cover requirements where they make sense

When working with users to gather requirements, especially non-technical clients or users, you often need to listen past what they’re saying and try to think about how they will interact with your features when the project is done. For example, take this simple requirement:

“We want a contact form that people can use to send us an email.”

Sounds simple enough. How would you solve this requirement?

Continue reading Mapping Requirements to Deliverables with Tools

Many developers would barely stop to think before dropping a few textboxes on a page, wiring them up to a submit button, and then sending an email with the collected info. Meets the requirement, but is it enough? Is that what the evolved professional .NET developer should be delivering today?

Thinking with Tools

When you have a professional developer toolbox, you gain an entirely fresh perspective on what can be accomplished in a project with limited time. In our example above, a toolbox lets us say during the design phase:

The users want a contact form. Easy. We can not only deliver a contact form, we can deliver a form, with validation, that can be edited at any time using a simple, visual form-editing tool, that can even be reused for any other data collection purpose on the website.

In short, tools turn “No’s” in to “Yes’s” at not extra cost to your project.

Can we edit the forms on our website? Yes. (Embedded WuFoo forms)
Can we export all of our data to Excel, Word, and PDF? Yes. (Single property in RadGrid, RadEditor)
Can we crop, resize, and rotate our images? Yes. (Built-in RadEditor Image Manager)
Can we have a attractive charts for our data? Yes. (Charts for Silverlight in ASP.NET)
Can we have localized versions of all our pages? Yes (Built-in Sitefinity feature).
Can we have unicorns fly off the screen? Yes…err…no.

When you have tools you know how to use, and you understand the capabilities of those tools, you can deliver way more than expected to your clients. And since tools, like Telerik’s Premium Collection, make it easy for you, the developer, you can spend more time polishing the custom features tools don’t cover.

Designing with Tools

Now that you’re thinking with tools, you go a step further and design with tools. Instead of  designing in loose terms, you can plug-in specific tools with known capabilities and quickly get past basic scenarios. Features previously considered “extra effort,” are now “free” because they’re automatically provided by a tool. Or, at least, free to you.

Context menus.
Filtering, sorting, paging, grouping, hierarchy.
Client-side binding for desktop-like performance.
Rating controls with client-side APIs.
Word-like editing in the browser.
Scheduler with day, week, and month views and drag/drop support.
Captcha validation for forms.

Just as the wide availability of light fixtures, doors, windows, and home automation systems frees an architect to design a more impressive house, tools for .NET developers help you build better software.

Challenge

Next time you start designing a project, try thinking with the Telerik Premium Collection. Review the online demos now, get a sense for all the features built-in, and then watch during your design phase how many places you can quickly improve or enhance a feature with built-in tool features. It will feel like cheating, but it’s not.

Tools used during WAM

To build our charity’s website, we relied heavily on tools to provide superior experiences and to maximize the amount of control we could put in non-technical users’ hands. We wanted to make it possible for non-technical users to have the power to update almost any portion of the site after the project shipped- from email templates to the site header and footer.

Tools we ended-up using:

• Sitefinity
  This was the huge platform time saver. More than half of our team had never developed with Sitefinity before the 40 hour dev sprint began. Two of our team members had only casual experience with ASP.NET. We still delivered incredible results in 2 days, as did all other teams (there were more than 10) that used Sitefinity that weekend. Right out of the box we were able to give our users control over pages, content, templates, and permissions. And with a simple Module system, we quickly added custom business process support, support for customizing email templates, and many helpful page controls for performing tasks like embedding YouTube videos on a page.
• RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
  The RadControls actually ship with Sitefinity, so it was natural to use these to extend our website. Built-in features like exporting to Excel and RadEditor’s Word-like content editing gave us quick wins in our project.
• OpenAccess ORM
  We wanted to be as productive working with our custom data as we were with our UI, so we used OpenAccess ORM for all our custom modules. Again, half of our team was new to this tool on day one, but working productively within hours.
• WuFoo
  Cool service that let’s non-technical users build and edit forms that can be embedded in a website. We used this service to empower our users to have unlimited control over forms in the future.
• Kimbia
  Our charity wanted to accept donations, and they didn’t want to use PayPal. Kimbia is like a specialized PayPal service focused exclusively on helping sites collect donations.

Now that we’ve finalized our requirements and completed our design, with tools helping us deliver on our ambitious 2 day goals, it’s time to start coding. In the next part, we’ll talk about building websites as a team in TFS.

My Top 5 Wallpapers, In case you cared

I rarely post highly off-topic posts to Telerik Watch, but I’ve come to recognize that every now and then, an off-topic post can be refreshing. There are a few things that we as professional software developers interact with on average for more than 8 hours a day:

• Our chair
• Our keyboard/mouse
• Our monitor
• Our computer
• Our (computer) desktop

It’s important that each of these things be optimized for your comfort so that you can focus on being a great developer/designer/evangelist/computer person. And of all of these, the easiest to change and optimize is your desktop wallpaper.

Is there a perfect desktop wallpaper? No.

Everyone has their own wallpaper taste. [SIDENOTE: Why do we still call these images “wallpapers?” Wouldn’t “Desktop Background” be more appropriate? Legacy words…] For me, I like wallpapers that are simple and abstract. I like wallpapers that don’t strain the eye by being too bright, or distract the mind by being too busy. Like you, I’ve used many wallpapers in the past, but here’s my current top 5 (including a custom Telerik Wallpaper):

(Sorry- No link for the clouds…)

And the image currently on my desktop:

Enjoy! What are your favorite wallpapers? Your kids? Landscapes? Anything I’d like?

New Reporting videos on Telerik TV

If you’re working with Telerik Reporting, or if you’re thinking about working with Telerik Reporting, I’ve got good news. There are now four new videos on Telerik TV just for you, including the recording from today’s Reporting webinar! To help you find these resources quickly, here are some quick links to Telerik TV:

• Working with Charts in Telerik Reporting
  Learn how to add and configure chart elements in your reports
• Grouping, Sorting, and Filtering in Telerik Reports
  Learn how to take full control of these features in a Telerik Report
• Working with Tables, Lists, and Cross Tabs
  Today’s webinar recording. Learn how to add, configure, style, and data bind these elements
• Getting Started with the Silverlight Report Viewer
  Read to add reports to Silverlight? You are with Telerik Reporting. Learn how to get started with the industry’s first native XAML report viewer for Silverlight.

There are more great videos for Reporting in the pipeline, so check back next week for even more Reporting help. If you’re new to Telerik Reporting, don’t forget to check-out the online demos, too. There are some basic videos there that help you learn how to configure various reports.

Building a Website in 40 hours, Part 1

Welcome to the first part of a multi-part series on Telerik Watch describing the process for building an impressive website in 2 days. In this series, I am going to share tips and tricks, along with some real world stories, for building a high-quality, usable website that supports critical business processes in less than 48 hours (if you’re working on WAM Weekend Time).

The purpose of this series is two-fold:

1. If you’re going to participate in a Givecamp, this advice should help your Givecamp team deliver incredible results in the short 2-day period you have to work
2. If you’re just interested in comparing your website building process to someone else’s, this series may highlight ideas and approaches you’ve overlooked in the past

Along the way, I’ll highlight best practices for building standards-based websites, different tools and frameworks that “Team Telerik” used at We Are Microsoft 2010 to be successful, and, of course, how the Telerik tools helped us do weeks worth of work in two days.

Let’s begin…

Continue reading Building a Website if 40 hours

Pre-planning

If you’re going to participate in a Givecamp, or meet with a client for that matter, you need to do some pre-planning. You need to do some research about the people you are about to serve and try to understand their motivations, their expectations, and- critical for web development- where they’re coming from with their existing website.

The goal of pre-planning: create a list of intelligent questions.

If you can have a focused list of questions prepared for your first meeting with your charity (or client), they will have infinitely more trust in your ability to deliver high quality results. It’s like a job interview. A good interview may get you the job, but a great interview will get you the job and a signing bonus.

Requirements

There is very little I can offer on the subject of effectively gathering requirements that has not already been archived somewhere on the web. What I can say is that even in the environment of a Givecamp (or any other time constrained project), detailed requirements gathering is critical. Make sure you spend time getting answers to your pre-planning questions and really try to understand the key goals of your client’s project. Charity or not, failure at this step makes everything that follows much harder.

How much time should you spend on requirements at a Givecamp?

This will obviously vary by team and charity, but Team Telerik did not start touching code until nearly 10:00 PM on day one. We spent a solid 4 to 5 hours meeting with our charity, discussing our objectives, and mapping out our requirements for the weekend. When all was done and said, we had a huge whiteboard that defined our key deliverables, and that served as our road map for the weekend. It also served as the informal contract between our team and our charity for what would be delivered by the end of the weekend.

From our high-level objectives, we started mapping out the specific features and actions that our website would need to support. We also started to identify the tasks that would require extra research or the features that would “Nice to Haves,” but maybe not feasible in 40 hours.

Time to start coding? Nope. Not yet.

Work Smarter, Not Harder.

Now that your requirements are clearly defined, you need to start planning for the execution. Some developers would suggest that means you’re at the point where you start writing tests or code, but if you’re a “work smarter, not harder” developer, that means you want to fully evaluate the tools, services, and frameworks that already exist and that can help you do more in less time.

A great developer does not write every line of code in an application by hand. A great developer knows how to find and use great tools, only writing code where it creates unique value for the project.

With that in mind, stay tuned for part 2: Mapping requirements to deliverables with tools in mind.

Telerik wins Red Herring Global 100

In case you haven't noticed, Telerik is growing. We are constantly working in new directions to support .NET developers and deliver all of the tools and UI components that developers need to be successful. If we make your job easier, we've done our job. From our humble roots in 2002 making UI components for ASP.NET, then a fledgling platform from Microsoft, to 2009 where we offer UI components for ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, WPF, and WinForms, and tools like OpenAccess ORM, Telerik Reporting, JustCode, WebUI Test Studio, and the popular Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard for TFS- not to mention our investment in CMS with Sitefinity- we've come a long ways.

It's always an honor, then, to see your efforts recognized in a significant way. Telerik was recognized in a big way by being named to the Red Herring Global 100 list for 2009. The Global 100 lists the top 100 private tech companies in the world. Last year, Telerik placed on the Europe 100, so this year's jump to the Global list is a huge step forward. In the past, companies like Google, YouTube, Skype, and Yahoo have been recognized with this award (and we all know where those companies are today). Other recognized companies on 2009's Red Herring lists include Parallels, Twitter, and Ustream.

Of course, none of this is possible without your continued support and feedback. We drive our business in direct response to your input, so keep it coming. With our new PITS system and some exciting plans for 2010, we're confident that this will be another big year for Telerik, and I can't wait to be part of the progress.

In the mean time, thank you for your support. And thank you to Telerik for taking the bet on me more than 3 years ago. Here's to our continuing global domination in the name of making .NET developers more productive!

Random Online Utility: SQL Profiler Express

Here's a handy tool I stumbled upon this week: SQL Profiler Express. While not a web-based tool, it's still handy. It's a small (1.5 MB), free, open-source Windows application that provides SQL Profiler-like features for SQL Express 2005 and 2008. Somewhat ironically, the project is hosted on Google Code and not on Codeplex, but the software runs exactly as advertised.

For those not familiar with SQL Profiler, it is a tool from Microsoft that normally installs with full versions of SQL Server. It allows you to essentially "sniff," or "trace," all of the communication with an instance of SQL Server that you have permission to access. It is a very helpful tool for seeing what's really happening at the database level when debugging or optimizing your application. For example, you can use profiler to see exactly what SQL is being executed when you use OpenAccess ORM or LinqToSQL.

Unfortunately, SQL Profiler does not ship with SQL Express. Kind of a bummer since most .NET developers these days install the Express tools on their local dev machines. Enter SQL Profiler Express.

The tool provides most of the key functionality that you need as a developer from the "full" SQL Profiler, and as I said before, it works exactly as advertised. Point it at a SQL Server Express instance, define your trace parameters, and start watching the SQL activity. In some ways, I even prefer it over the real Profiler since it is small, lightweight, and provides a focused set of features.

Add it to your developer toolbox and be sure to thank the developers for contributing this to the community.

Google ending support for IE6 in 2010, Telerik support continues

If you develop for the web, you know IE6. The default browser that ships with Windows XP is the bane of any "standards-based" developer. For public web site developers, it adds days- if not weeks- to development cycles for testing and tweaking site functions to work in the ancient "broken" browser. If you work in a company still running XP and IE6, you may not notice the problem today, but eventually your sites will have to say goodbye to IE6, and with that transition will come your introduction to the pain the rest of the world has suffered.

There have been public initiatives for years trying to get companies (almost all "home" computers auto-upgraded via Windows Update to IE7 years ago) to ditch IE6. Sites like IE6Update.com and BringDownIE6.com try to educate and provide an easy upgrade path for users stuck on 6. But after more 9 years, IE6 still holds a 22% global market share (to IE7's 17% and IE8's 19% in Q409).

Many famous sites have already reduced support for IE6, calling it "unsupported" and providing a reduced or "non-guaranteed" experience. Apple, Facebook, and YouTube are some of the higher profile examples to-date. Now Google is turning-up the heat.

I received an email as an administrator of a Google Apps for Domains (Google's business-oriented service platform for its apps) account that included the following message:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

In short, Google is ending support of IE6 for it's major business apps, like Gmail and Google Docs, this year.

This will clearly help accelerate the end of IE6's relevant market share, but it also opens some critical questions. Why doesn't Microsoft adopt the same aggressive stance for its own web apps? For Silverlight? Do you need to support IE6 in your own public web apps?

While we can all hope for a day when web standards will unify to a level that we can really embrace the power of HTML5, Telerik will in the mean time continue to support IE6, as we recognize that some of you may be "trapped" in IE6 organizations. This obviously adds a fair amount of overhead to our own development process since it makes adding new features more difficult, but we are committed to supporting the needs of our customers. While the rest of the world calls IE6 unsupported, Telerik continues to work hard to help you support it if you must.

But what do you think? Is IE6 still relevant to your development? Or can we all agree to join Google and make 2010 the year we say goodbye to IE6? Let me know. I'm always listening.

Web optimization with MVC webinar this week

This week's Weekly Webinar puts me back in the driver's seat to take you on a tour of some very cool tools in Telerik's open source Extensions for MVC. We'll be taking an extended look at the web asset optimization components, ScriptRegistrar and StylesheetRegistrar. These tools have been around since the beginning of our efforts with MVC, but they have been significantly improved with the evolution of the Extension suite. In this webinar, we'll dive-deep and explore the various ways these two components make it easy to embrace the four "Cs" of web optimization:

• Combine (reducing initial requests)
• Cache (reducing follow-up requests)
• Compress (reducing bits over the wire)
• Content Delivery Network (reducing latency to bits)

If you're working with MVC, this will be an event you don't want to miss. The techniques I will demo will make it possible to optimize your JavaScript and CSS resources as much as technically possible. We'll also explore the new Telerik CDN (with support for MVC), and cover some future-looking topics about the next release of the Telerik Extensions. It will be a fast-paced, info-packed, Todd Anglin signature webinar. If you want to join, register now to save your spot and get a link to the live event. You must attend live to participate in the Q&A, and that is often where some of the best info gets shared. The live event happens this Thursday, February 4th at 11:00 AM EST (8:00 AM PST, 4:00 PM GMT). See you on Thursday!

Public Information Tracking System now live on Telerik.com

If you've been around Telerik for any amount of time, you've probably had this thought: Telerik is awesome, and their support is uber-awesome. I just wish I didn't have to bother them to keep-up with different issues and feature requests they're working on. I wish I could just track bugs and features on my own. And it would be super cool if I could get automatic notifications of changes to the issues I care about! Or something like that. Your wishes have been granted with the release of our new Public Information Tracking System, or PITS. PITS is a Silverlight-based tool that is connected directly to the Telerik Team Foundation Server, where internal teams log and update all of their work items for the various Telerik products. That means PITS gives you a direct look at our plans and progress as we work on improving and enhancing the tools from release to release. It's an unprecedented level of transparency for a software company, but we are that committed to delivering the best possible support communication. The version of PITS you see today is technically a "preview," and more features are planned for the "official" release, such as issue filtering, grouping, and better integration is the existing support ticket system for issue submission. Still, in today's PITS you can:

• View Open, In Progress, and Resolved issues for all products for the current cycle
• View details for each "issue" (an issue can be a bug or a feature request)
• Add issues to your "Tracked Issues" to receive auto updates on status changes
• Directly download fixes to resolved issues
• Vote for open issues! (more on this in a second)
• Comment on and discuss issues
• See charts showing issue progress over time

PITS is built with the RadControls for Silverlight, so it's also a great showcase of a truly smart use of Silverlight for a LOB application scenario. Don't miss the RadTileView implementation! Try minimizing and maximizing the different tiles to see how the data presentation dynamically changes. By far one of the cooler features! Finally, don't miss your chance to let your voice have an even louder impact on our product plans. We always listen to customers, but in the past, customers rarely get to see what other customers are saying. With the new PITS voting system, you can publicly vote for the open issues that you think are more important than others. We'll be using this feedback to directly prioritize our TFS work items, and it will now be clear if you're the only person who wants a feature or if it's a feature that everyone wants (i.e. votes are public). PITS is an incredible tool and it's available to all customers. Check it out and let us know what you think. We have lots of great improvements planned, but we hope you enjoy this new level of involvement in the Telerik development process!

Join Prism webinar today @ 11 AM Eastern

After a missed week (recovery from WAM), the Weekly Webinar is back at its normal time this Thursday today! Today's topic is Prism, or more accurately, the Composite Application Guidance from Microsoft. Prism is Microsoft's next generation framework for building highly-maintainable, loosely-coupled XAML applications, and almost any Silverlight or WPF application can benefit from using this tool. Our resident CAB expert, Robert Shoemate, will be hosting the webinar this week, and he'll be providing an extra layer of insight for WinForms developers trying to make the switch from CAB and SCSF to CAG and WPF. The event kicks-off at 11:00 AM Eastern (8:00 AM Pacific, 4:00 PM GMT) and, as always, it will be recorded and posted to Telerik TV for those that can't attend the live event. Register now to get your log-in details for the webinar and don't miss your chance to start improving your XAML skills. If you're a .NET developer, these are pretty important skills to sharpen these days! Next week's webinar? I'll be covering web asset optimization with the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC (and maybe some other cool MVC topics, too!).

WAM 2010 Wrap-up

It's been over a week since I posted the "wrap-up" thoughts from Day One of our 48-hour WAM weekend. So I think it's time I provide some follow-up "event wrap-up" thoughts and comments. First, let me say that I had every intention of blogging more during the event. But after 40 hours of head-down programming and a few hours of sleep, the mental clarity to blog drifted away. Hopefully you kept-up with the action on the Telerik Facebook page where I posted some exclusive video updates. One update in-particular captures the hazy sensation of developing on a lot of junk food and little sleep! Team Telerik did an incredible job, though. I set an ambitious set of goals for 48-hours of requirements gathering/planning/design/implementation, and the team rose to the challenge. It helped that our charity, We Help Ourselves (new website will be live very soon), also had ambitious requirements. In a single weekend, we delivered a platform that empowers their non-technical staff members to completely control the WHO website- from page content to email templates- while simultaneously automating two of their most critical business processes. Like I said: ambitious. We owe much of our success to the Sitefinity platform and OpenAccess. These tools gave us the head-start we needed to focus on development instead of infrastructure. In fact, Sitefinity powered many of the weekend's charity website re-builds. No fewer than 10 teams (out of 20) used Sitefinity, and all seemed to achieve high degrees of success. I think there were even a few teams so discouraged by their first CMS platform choice that they switched to Sitefinity half-way though the weekend. That means they built their sites in just 24 hours! Needless to say, it was an exhausting event, but well worth the effort. I will be blogging over the next few weeks in more detail about the process we used to achieve success in 48 hours, which will hopefully produce some guidance that will help you be successful on your next project- which you hopefully have more time to complete! Want to try your hand at this event and give back to your local community? Look for a Give Camp near you (only Dallas- the original- uses the We Are Microsoft name) and get involved. If you use Sitefinity, let us know so we can feature your story and results!

WAM Update: Close of "day" one

We Are Microsoft is underway and "day" one is drawing to a close. It's 6:30 AM local time now, and we've been going hard since 3:00 PM yesterday. We're excited by our progress and the advantage that Sitefinity has given our project, but we know much work remains if we are to satisfy all of the goals of our charity. Just to keep you, dear well-rested reader, up to speed, here's the last 16 hours in summary:

• About 2 hours spent covering WAM "basics" in the previously blogged kick-off meeting
• We then spent a solid 2 hours talking with our charity (WHO) and refining their requirements
• Over a 45 minute dinner break (of cold pizza), we turned the refined requirements in to an action plan
• We reunited with our charity to present our plan of action, cover last minute details, and then it was off to the races. Time: 9:30 PM.
• From 9:30 PM to what is now closer to 7:00 AM, we've been doing everything from designing CSS to building HTML to building custom Sitefinity user controls and modules to integrating 3rd party services (like Kimbia, a new service our charity introduced us to that helps with accepting donations)

And that's day/night/morning one! Well, other than the blogging and videos, of course. There are already 3 or 4 exclusive videos on the Telerik Facebook page from WAM, and many more will come before the weekend is done. Check 'em out and stay tuned for more updates.

Charity Weekend Kick-off

Team Telerik is in Dallas and getting ready to kick-off a weekend of intense charity and web development. As I type, the kick-off meeting is underway and more than 75 developers are being prepped for what lies ahead. In a few short minutes, teams will break, meet with their charities, and start the 48-hour push to the 2:00 PM Sunday delivery.

Team Telerik is here serving double triple duty:

• We're training the many teams using Sitefinity CMS
• We're capturing lots of video for Telerik TV and Facebook
• We're building a site for a charity!

Our 5-person team will be blogging throughout this process, capturing the process of building a website from beginning to end with Telerik's tools. We'll publish these posts over the next week so you can learn from (and critique) our process.

And remember: we'll be capturing special video content exclusively for our Telerik Facebook page! If you're not a Telerik Facebook Fan, this weekend is a great time to become one so you can enjoy our extra content.

That's all for now. I'm off to find some caffeine and start the development clock.

[P.S. Most of us are on Twitter, too. Follow my weekend updates @toddanglin.]

Telerik Charity Weekend (this weekend)

Team Telerik (literally) will be participating in the "We Are Microsoft" Charity Challenge Weekend this weekend in Dallas, Texas. We Are Microsoft is the original Give Camp. In short, it's like Habitat for Humanity for developers, where developers contribute their time "doing what they do"- writing software. Here's how it works:

Teams of developers volunteer to build websites for charities. The challenge starts on Friday afternoon and ends on Sunday. In that time, teams must build a complete website for their assigned charity and then demo it on Sunday for a chance at winning prizes.

It's a weekend of caffeine, sugar, snack food, no sleep, and lots of developing.

I know. A normal weekend for many developers, but let's assume this is a more intense, focused weekend of the aforementioned vices than other developer weekends.

This year, Telerik is not only sponsoring the event and providing training to the many developers using Telerik tools and Sitefinity CMS, we are also participating as a development team. We will be building a new website for WHO (We Help Ourselves), an organization that provides education to children to help them avoid becoming victims of abuse.

We will be chronicling our adventures of building a website in 48 hours with Telerik tools in blog posts that will be published next week. We will also be capturing some of the process on video that will be exclusively published to our Telerik Facebook page. Become a fan of Telerik now on Facebook to keep-up with our video journal!

It will be a great weekend of giving back to society, and Telerik is proud to contribute to this charitable effort. Stay tuned for our flurry of updates this weekend, and forgive us in advance if the sleep-deprived, caffeine-stoked posts are not perfect!

Getting ready for Q1 2010 Telerik bits

Time marches on. The year 2009 is now soundly in the review mirror and it's time to start looking ahead to 2010. The first major event of the year- the event I know you've been building your entire schedule around- is the Telerik Q1 2010 release (planned for March 2010). This is going to be an exciting release cycle. Trust me.

I can't share everything now (clearly), but you can start to get a glimpse of what's coming by looking at the recently updated road maps for the Telerik developer products. The Silverlight, WPF, and ASP.NET AJAX road maps are currently live, and others for Reporting, WinForms, and ORM will be coming soon (I've got some "inside" reports in this post, though). In the mean time, here are some highlights:

ASP.NET AJAX

• New Controls! - Filter: A stand alone filter UI control that can be used with Grid and ListView - AsyncUpload(!): A async file upload control from Telerik (i.e. upload with no postback)
• (Some) Cool Enhancements (there are many) - RadCaptcha: Audio CAPTCHA support - RadEditor: RTF & PDF import/export - RadGrid: Improved filtering UI, new Rating column - RadScheduler: Auto UI for indicating "out of view" appointments - Out-of-the-box JavaScript IntelliSense (for VS 2008 & 2010) - New common skin: Windows 7

Silverlight/WPF

• General Improvements - Major focus on streamlining control templates, minimizing assembly size (SL), streamlining/simplifying control templates, and improving animations/transitions (i.e. a major "improve what you've got" release) - SL4 beta support (this release will still be primarily SL3, though)
• New Controls - (Beta) RadEditor for SL & WPF(!): based on SL4, early preview (this control will grow in 2010) - (Official) RadMap for SL & WPF: Official release of control intro'd in Q309 - Transition control: new tool for making animation configuration easier
• (Other) Major Improvements - RadGridView: Built-in paging UI - RadChart: New optimizations for handling millions of data points - RadScheduler: New UI virtualization for better handling of many appointments

WinForms will be getting a radically improved (all new, in fact) Visual Style Builder and a revamped data engine for the RadGridView. The road map will be updated soon, and a beta of the Q1 work will even be available early next month!

Reporting is focusing on some major improvements to the data engine, too, and it will move rendering of Silverlight reports from the server to the client (making performance of that viewer better because only data will travel the wire). Improved chart data binding in reports is also expected.

ORM has a very cool road map. I can't reveal much here right now, but stay tuned (sorry). It should be worth the wait.

The other developer tools- MVC and JustCode- are being updated, too, obviously. Both are betas, though, so they don't have formal road maps at this point. JustCode is being constantly updated, so you can join the beta if you want to keep-up with its progress. MVC is focusing on adding data editing support to the Grid, along with providing the necessary UI Extensions for supporting data editing (like a Calendar/DatePicker).

See. It's going to be a big Q1. First beta (WinForms) drops in a few weeks, so start making time now.

First webinar of the New Year this Thursday at LIDNUG

Now that the holidays are winding down and work is starting to wind back up to its modern, frenetic speed, it's time to get back to business. And that means it's time to attend another webinar! But before I get to the details...

Happy New Year! Hopefully by now you've seen the Telerik 'Happy Holidays' video on Telerik TV. If not, check it out for a quick New Year's message. Everyone at Telerik is very excited about the possibilities 2010 presents and I know you are going to be very happy to see some of the new and improved products we're working on. Keep your RSS reader's locked-in to Telerik Watch for all the latest and greatest, and for even faster updates, follow @toddanglin and @telerik on Twitter.

This week I'll be doing the first webinar of the year at the LinkedIn .NET Users Group (or LIDNUG). LIDNUG is one of (the?) largest DNUGs by membership count, and all of their meetings are done virtually through Live Meeting. At this meeting, I've been asked to provide a quick lap around the Telerik developer tools. We're obviously doing a lot these days, so it's easy to miss something that could be saving you time. This webinar/meeting will try to draw your attention to our various tools for developers, highlighting how they save you time. If you're interested in Telerik and ways to save time, this event is for you.

Register for the LIDNUG meeting now and then join us on Thursday, January 7th (tomorrow) at 11:00 AM PACIFIC (1:00 PM Central, 2:00 PM Eastern).

Oh! And I'll be giving away 2 Telerik Premium Collection licenses, too, making this also your first chance to be a winner in the New Year.

Keeping up with the browsers: Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, IE 9

Want something to play with over the holidays? If you are a web developer- and I know many of you reading Telerik Watch are- then there is a new wave of web browsers just waiting for you to kick the tires. In fact, the next wave of web browsers may be here faster than you think. Firefox's next major release, version 3.6 (codenamed Namoroka), is already in Beta 4 and it is scheduled to ship in "late 2009" (a schedule that, if it is to be met, means RTW is imminent). Google's rapidly evolving Chrome browser is currently available in its 4th major revision on Google's beta channel. And at PDC last month, we started to get some early details about Microsoft's IE 9. As a web developer, it's critical to stay at the bleeding-edge of browsers, not only to ensure your applications remain compatible, but also to start exploring the technologies of tomorrow that will enable you to do more than ever with standards-based sites. Remember, if you build a standards-based website, the browser is your application delivery platform. Changes to browsers have a BIG impact on your application. As your resident beta tester, I've been running all of the latest browser betas full-time. What follows are some early impressions and highlights so that you can confidently jump start your own exploration of the future of the web. Continue reading to learn more about the future of web browsers

Firefox 3.6 (currently Beta 4 Beta 5) Arriving roughly 6 months after FF 3.5, Firefox 3.6 is primarily aiming at continuing what its predecessor started. That means faster browser performance; increased support for HTML5 and CSS3; and more "chrome" features for users. Mozilla explicitly states that goals for FF 3.6 include improving browser start-up time and time to complete actions at significant enough level that users notice the improvement (by Mozilla standards, that means > 50ms improvement).

Firefox 3.6 is now in Beta 5 (as of today), and should be shipping RC then RTW very soon. I've been using FF 3.6 full-time since Beta 3 and I have no complaints. In general, the browser does feel a bit "snappier" and I have not had any issue with instability in the beta. And the one critical hurdle for any new version of Firefox? Does FireBug support it. Fortunately for FF 3.6, it does. Other plug-ins, like the Web Developer Toolbar and Window Resizer, do not (yet), but with Firebug, I'm okay. (On latest check, it seems even WDT is ready for 3.6, so it looks like most plug-ins are getting ready for the big release.) Verdict: FF 3.6 is a good step forward for a browser known to be slow and it further helps make HTML5 a viable standard for web development. No reason not to upgrade now. Chrome 4 (currently Beta) If it wasn't clear before, it should be clear now. Google is versioning Chrome at pace designed to mock Gmail's 5-year beta. The fourth version (!) of the just-turned one-year old browser is now available as beta, and the biggest news for this release is that the browser is now available on the Mac and Linux platforms. In addition to new platform support, Chrome 4 is adding the much needed extension support (sorry, no Firebug for Chrome yet...only Firebug lite), built-in bookmark syncing support, and improved support for CSS (proven by passing the Acid3 test). For developers, Chrome 4- like FF 3.6 and the already release Safari 4- is continuing to push support for CSS3 and HTML5. This aggressive adoption of the "next generation" standards web gives hope that 2022 will just be bad joke from the W3C. We may be able to be plugin-less RIAs after all! The extensions support is nice, too, since it opens the door to putting Chrome on par with FF for developer productivity. Verdict: Chrome 4 seems more stable than previous versions, as fast as ever, and is shaping-up to be a more "developer-friendly" browser. The OS X experience is on par with Windows, though as a OS X Safari user, Chrome seems less necessary due to Safari's already fast performance. IE 9 (currently unavailable) Ah, Internet Explorer. How I used to love thee. Really. I was a hold-out back when Firefox started sweeping the globe, insisting that tabs were for A.D.D. and that IE was all I needed for browsing the web. All it took was a few months of doing hardcore CSS development against IE6 and then viewing those results in other "standards-based" browsers for me to change my mind. IE has been playing catch-up with the other browsers for years now, trying to break from the past and better support standards rendering in a fast, secure browser. At PDC 2009, Microsoft revealed some limited details about their next attempt to catch-up. They openly acknowledged in side-by-side comparisons that IE has room for improvement next to its competitors, and they suggested that IE9 will finally put Microsoft on par for both performance and support for handling standards like CSS3. They were less clear about their plans for HTML5, but we can only assume they'll be following the lead of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to provide as much support as possible. It's impossible to say much more about IE9 at this point since we only have a description of Microsoft's intent, but let's hope the bits rise to the challenge and do continue to right the wrongs of the past. I also hope Microsoft can find a way to develop versions of IE faster. Firefox and Chrome are showing how much faster we can adopt standards when we get used to auto-updating browsers every 6-months. If Microsoft could join that schedule, I think we'd see the evolution of web standards radically accelerate. Verdict: IE9 has a lot of promise, but so far that's all it's got. Wrap-up (There are other browsers...) On a parting note, I think it's worth at least mentioning the other two "major" browsers: Safari and Opera. Both of these browsers are a bit ahead of the curve at this point, with major releases already in production that support CSS3 and many HTML5 features. In fact, broadly speaking, WebKit (and thus Safari) is one of the leading engines for accurately processing these next-gen standards. Opera does have a Alpha preview of it's next major version (10.2), and as Opera tends to do, they are breaking new ground for a "browser." Instead of doing more refinement to their chrome (which arguably has been ahead of the game forever), they are now taking browser "applications" to the desktop with "Opera Widgets." It's cool, but it's Opera. History says- for whatever reason- that they just don't know how to find mass appeal on the desktop. Whichever browser you look at, the future is clearly headed in the same direction. All browsers are acknowledging the role they play in many daily computing activities and they are driving for maximum performance. All browsers are working hard to better support standards like CSS3 and HTML5. And all browsers are continuing to try to differentiate by building unique "chrome" features aimed at end users instead of trying to build proprietary rendering engines. The Browser War II is in full-swing. Isn't it fun?!

Q3 2009 SP1s now available, Telerik CDN live

With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, Telerik has delivered some early gifts for your immediate download and enjoyment. The first round of service packs for all of the Q3 2009 Telerik developer tools are now waiting for you download on Telerik.com. If you've been following @Telerik on Twitter, you'd know that we've been releasing these SPs over the last week, but now all products have their updates.

I'll share some highlights from SP1 below, but first I want call extra attention to the new Telerik CDN (Content Delivery Network). Live with the Q3 2009 SP1 release of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, this new Telerik provided CDN is a new way for you to further optimize your Telerik web applications. CDN's allow you to download CSS, JavaScript, and image resources from remote servers, putting bits closer to users (for faster access), overcoming browser concurrent request limits and improving the "shared cachability" of these bits. I'll talk more about the Telerik CDN in the future, but for now be sure to read Tsvetomir's post on the Telerik Blogs.

Finally, here are some things you don't want to miss in Q3 2009 SP1 (and a quick "official" version number reference with direct link to the release notes):

• RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX [2009.3.1208.1]
• [New] Telerik CDN + Auto support for CDN in "Manager" controls
• [New] Windows 7 common skin
• [VS Extensions] Improved support for VS2010 Beta + CDN support
• [RadScheduler] New visual cue for non-visual appointments
• [RadRating] New DbValue property (primarily to support DbNull values)
• 14+ fixes for RadEditor
• 20+ fixes for RadGrid + new "DefaultInsertValue" property
• RadControls for WinForms [2009.3.1203.1]
• [TPF] Animation loops now possible + More perf optimizations
• [RadDock] Many new properties for easier config + VS 2008 Theme
• 15+ fixes for RadGridView + New features, like select column cells on header click
• RadControls for Silverlight/WPF [2009.3.1208.1]
• Significantly improved VS 2010 support (Toolbox, Designer preview, Property browsing)
• TONS(!) of improvements, fixes, and changes in RadGridView (new things like Delete key support, programatic pre-filtering support, ability to control "insert row" visibility, etc.)
• [RadScheduler] Localization of time markers
• [RadMenu] Fixed memory leaks
• [RadRibbonBar] Now has a Windows 7 theme that matches Office 14
• [RadMap] New support for OpenStreetMap + New extensibility options
• (NOTE: To run the Q3 2009 SP1 demos locally, you need might need WCF RIA Services Beta for VS 2008 installed.)
• [Beta] Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC [2009.3.1210.1]
• [New] Windows 7 common theme (matches Ajax theme)
• JavaScript size and perf optimizations for all extensions
• Items that are selected are now expanded by default
• [Grid] 2+ columns can now be filtered
• [Grid] Screen bounds detection for filter menu
• [Menu, Panelbar] Hierarchal item support
• [TabStrip] Support for nested tabstrips
• OpenAccess ORM [2009.3.1119.1]
• [LINQ] Server-side support for SingleOrDefault
• [LINQ] Improved JOIN support with filtering and ordering
• [Backend] Several fixes for SQL Server and MySql support
• [General] Improved VS 2010 Beta support + Enhanced project wizards
• Telerik Reporting [2009.3.1211.1]
• Improved VS 2010 report designer support
• [Silverlight Viewer] Many fixes and new features (like SSL support and support for Telerik themes) + New API reference
• Minor fixes for both WinForms and WebForms viewers
• [PDF Rendering] New support for bookmarks and document map
• JustCode [2009.3.1211.1]
• (While not technically a "SP1" release, there is a new build of JustCode you shouldn't miss, so I thought I'd include details.)
• Many performance improvements across all operations
• [New] Syntax colorization support (disabled by default for now)
• [JavaScript] New support for "Extract Method" (covering basic scenarios)
• 20+ fixes across C#, VB, ASP.NET, and HTML features

Phew! That's a lot of updates. Enjoy the bits!

Test Studio 2.0 webinar, Lucky license winner

If you missed today's info-packed What's New in WebUI Test Studio 2.0 webinar, you missed a great event with a valuable live Q & A. I was joined by ArtOfTest Co-Founder and CTO, Faris Sweis, who spent the majority of today's time showing-off the new features in the latest WebUI Test Studio release. We saw how the new Silverlight support makes it just as easy and intuitive to do "point and click" testing of Silverlight apps as ASP.NET/HTML applications. We saw how the new test recording tools make it easy to target specific elements in a test. And we got a good overview of how the free WebAii Testing Framework compares to WebUI Test Studio. All available (with the Q & A) on Telerik TV now!

As a reminder, WebUI Test Studio 2.0 is also available for immediate download on Telerik.com! Released today, you have instant access to all of the new features highlighted in today's webinar.

Finally, as part of the official launch of Test Studio 2.0, we're giving away 3 Test Studio licenses (each valued at $2500). Two will be given away as part of our Twitter and Facebook contests- visit Telerik.com for more details. One goes to a lucky winner from today's live webinar audience. And today's lucky winner is....

Cory Hudson!

Congrats to Cory and thanks to everyone for joining today's event. Enjoy the on-demand video and stay tuned for more Test Studio 2.0 content very soon.

Watch the recorded WebUI Test Studio 2.0 video on Telerik TV in full size

WebUI Test Studio 2.0 launches tomorrow (with webinar)

Hello again loyal Telerik Watch readers! It what has probably been the single longest stretch of "silence" on Telerik Watch in the last three years, I'm finally back in the saddle after the busy fall travel season. Good thing, too, because I'm just in time to let you know that tomorrow (Thursday) we're officially launching WebUI Test Studio 2.0!

We released a beta of WebUI Test Studio 2.0 with Q3 2009, but Thursday marks the official release. In case you missed the 2.0 release highlights (and these are truly tip of the iceberg highlights), here's a quick reminder:

• New (industry first) point & click automated UI test support for Silverlight
• Brand new VS UI test recorder "overlay surface" (basically, improved test recording tools)
• New element menu & "per element" testing
• New Translators for the RadControls for Silverlight

To help jumpstart your mastery of the new features, especially those now available for Silverlight, we're also hosting a webinar tomorrow to cover what's new in WebUI Test Studio 2.0. I'll be joined by ArtOfTest CTO Faris Sweis and together we'll show you the essentials of working with 2.0's new features.

The webinar kicks-off at our standard 11:00 AM Eastern, tomorrow, Thursday, December 10th. You can register now to save your seat, and then join us for the live event. With Faris participating, this is a great chance to come have all of your burning WebUI Test Studio (or WebAii Framework) questions answered.

Enjoy the official release bits and join us for the release webinar!

(Oh yeah! I almost forgot. We'll be giving away one WebUI Test Studio license to one lucky attendee of tomorrow's live event! Remember, WebUI Test Studio is not part of the Telerik Premium Collection, so this is a valuable $2500 prize even if you have the Telerik PC. There will be chances to win Test Studio on Twitter and Facebook, too, so don't fret if you absolutely can't make the live webinar. For everyone else, now you definitely need to go sign-up and attend!)