Thursday, June 16, 2011

Silverlight developer version

I was working on testing a Silverlight web with WCF I created I wanted to run the page in debug mode. When I tried to run it I got the error Silverlight Debug version not installed. After some quick we searching I found the installer for it from Microsoft and installed it. This enabled me to run and step thru the code in debug mode. Which is a nice feature to help in debugging and understanding the code.

Telerik Controls

I have been working with Telerik controls for the past month on my consulting business. Currently I still have not made my descision if they are worth purchasing or not. When I first started to use them I though they were great. Now I think they are great if your data happens to be in thier definition of a cookie cutter format. If your data meets that then they work great and you get web reports up and operational quickly. The flip side of this is if your data is not meeting the cookie cutter format, which most of mine will not. The you have to dig into their API and figure out how to manipulate the data to make it work. This is were you start to see the features they do not support that I could easly do in a datagrid. Such things as a easy way to sort a table that is not using sqlDataSource. I would almost prefer for them to just let me access a datagrid instead of their table for displaying data as an option. Do not get me wrong they do have a lot of options, but I just need to get something up and running quickly to meet my customers timeline and do not want to get a PHD in their controls to be able to use them.