Falafel Blog!

Dependency Properties in WPF & Silverlight Event in San Francisco

Lino Tadros — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:11:00 GMT

When: Wednesday, 7/15/2009 at 6:30 PM
Where: Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco

Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO of Falafel Software is presenting this session at the Bay.NET User Group at the Microsoft offices in San Francisco on July 15th 2009 starting 6:30 PM. Feel free to register for the Event here and look forward to seeing you there. It should be a very exciting and fun session.

Lino Tadros Awarded C# MVP for the 6th year

Lino Tadros — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:27:00 GMT

Capitola, CA - July 1st 2009, Microsoft awarded Lino Tadros, Falafel Software’s Chairman & CEO, the prestigious MVP award in the C# language category for the 6th year in a row. This award is mainly awarded to few individuals worldwide for their contributions in the C# community and helping Microsoft with the short term and long term strategies of the language.

Lino Tadros has been presenting numerous sessions on the language in the USA, Europe and Australia since the year 2000 in many of the industries’ top conferences.

ArtOfTest’s WebAii & Automation Design Canvas Webinar

Lino Tadros — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:16:00 GMT

On July 1st 2009, Falafel presented a 90 minute Webinar on the WebAii Framework and the Automation Design Canvas product from ArtOfTest. The Webinar touched on several areas like using the Automation Design Canvas in Visual Studio 2008, TestRegions, Browsers, AJAX testing and most of all Silverlight application testing in the new Q2 2009 Beta 2 release.

You can view the recording of the Webinar below, make sure you view it full screen. We hope you enjoy viewing the video and get a better understanding of the whole framework.

Let us know what other Webinars and videos you would like to see about these topics for future presentations.

Saving and Loading Summary Row Information in a RadGrid

Rachel Hagerman — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:35:40 GMT

One feature I really like in Telerik’s WinForms RadGrid control is the ability to save and load layout information using the Serialization API. It’s nice to be able to to persist appearance and other settings in XML format, so that they can be restored later and provide a more consistent feel for the user.

Telerik’s Knowledge Base has a great article here on how to use the API to persist selected property values. This is quite useful if, instead of using the default values which store many many grid settings, you only want to store a few settings. There’s even an example in this article, which can help get you started learning how to use the API to locate the desired properties.

This was the case with my application, where I needed to store the settings for Summary Rows in a RadGrid. I found it a little tricky to get the right set of metadata serialization info for the summary rows, but it is possible! By examining the XML file generated using default settings (which includes summary rows) and checking out the internal structure of the RadGrid’s summary rows, I finally found the right combination. So, to anyone else wanting to persist non-typical information, hopefully this will save you a little time. Here’s what worked for me:

this.radGridView1.XmlSerializationInfo.SerializationMetadata.Add( typeof(GridViewTemplate), "SummaryRowsBottom", DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.Content
); this.radGridView1.XmlSerializationInfo.SerializationMetadata.Add( typeof(GridViewSummaryRowItem), "GridViewSummaryItem", DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.Content
); this.radGridView1.XmlSerializationInfo.SerializationMetadata.Add( typeof(GridViewSummaryItem), "Aggregate", DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.Visible
); this.radGridView1.XmlSerializationInfo.SerializationMetadata.Add( typeof(GridViewSummaryItem), "FieldName", DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.Visible
); this.radGridView1.XmlSerializationInfo.SerializationMetadata.Add( typeof(GridViewSummaryItem), "FormatString", DesignerSerializationVisibilityAttribute.Visible
);

You’ll find that this will also persist any special formatting for the summary row title, and could easily be adjusted to use the top summary rows instead of bottom.

As always, you can find more help with Telerik’s RadGridView for WinForms on Telerik’s support site, or check out Falafel’s own training classes and consulting services .

Falafel releases the new TestComplete 7 book

Lino Tadros — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:17:00 GMT

Today, Falafel Software released the latest edition of its successful courseware material of TestComplete for the new 7.0 version. The courseware contains several new editions in many chapters and new chapters for Keyword Testing, one of the most exciting new features of TestComplete 7, and Web Testing as well. The book can be purchased on Lulu and it comes in spiral binding format for ease of use during labs and script exercises. The book is used as the main material for all TestComplete trainings (online, onsite & Summit) in the USA, Europe and Australia.

For more information about TestComplete training please contact AutomatedQA at sales@automatedqa.com or Falafel Software at training@falafel.com

Conditional directives and breakpoints

Brad Divine — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:25:36 GMT

If you are using conditional directives in your C# code, you know that you can't set a breakpoint on any code within the directives using Visual Studio. Thankfully, you can add a breakpoint programmatically:

#if MYSYMBOL

#if DEBUG
 System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
 #endif

DoSomethingForMySymbol();
#else
 #if DEBUG
 System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
 #endif

DoSomethingForEverythingElse();
#endif

System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break() can only be called in Debug mode, so make sure you wrap it in a #if DEBUG check first. Good luck!

Handling double-click events in a grid

Brad Divine — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:08:47 GMT

Here's a handy little tip for those of you using DataGrids or something similar, for instance, the Telerik RadGrid control. If you want to allow the user to double-click on a row to do something (edit the row, for example), implement the CellDoubleClick event handler for the grid and put your code in there.

If you do this, then double-clicks in the column header will also fire the event; this can happen if a user clicks the header too quickly while trying to sort. To prevent this, add code to check e.RowIndex. If the user double-clicked on a header, e.RowIndex will = -1.

Here's some example code for a RadGrid:

private void radGrid1_CellDoubleClick(object sender, GridViewCellEventArgs e)

{

     if (e.RowIndex != -1) // Edit
on double click, except when on the header.

      {

           DoSomethingSpecial();

      }

}

and for a DataGrid:

private void dataGridView1_CellDoubleClick(object sender, DataGridViewCellEventArgs e)
{

    if (e.RowIndex != -1) // Edit on double
click, except when on the header.

 {

DoSomethingSpecial();

}

}

Successfully passing Mouse events to another control's handler

Brad Divine — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:10:00 GMT

When programming for Windows, you'll sometimes want a container object (a form, a panel, etc.) to handle certain events, such as MouseOver, MouseMove, MouseUp, MouseDown, etc. But what happens if you have other controls in the container? You could write event handlers for each of those controls, but that seems like a lot of duplication of effort.

One solution to this problem is to send the child control's events that you'd like to capture to the event handlers of the container, e.g.

childControl.MouseMove += new MouseEventHandler(ParentControl_MouseMove);

This will send the event to the correct handler, but there is a problem: The parameter e.Location contains the mouse coordinates relative to the control which fired the event. If you want the event handler (which is assuming coordinates relative to the parent control) to behave correctly, you are going to need to translate the coordinates being passed to the handler.

Any class inheriting from Windows.Forms.Control will have a pair of methods, PointToScreen() and PointToClient() These will translate a Point from relative coordinates to screen coordinates, and screen coordinates to relative coordinates, respectively. Screen coordinates are our common denominator, so our solution will be to translate the relative coordinates we've been given into screen coordinates, then translate them from screen coordinates into the relative coordinates of our parent container.

Point mousePoint = parentControl.PointToClient(((System.Windows.Forms.Control)sender).PointToScreen(e.Location));

Voila! mousePoint now contains the mouse coordinates relative to the parent control, and we use that instead of e.Location within ParentControl_MouseMove() to do whatever we need to.

AJAX exception handling the easy way!

Brad Divine — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:37:27 GMT

If you're like me, you sometimes use AJAX controls in your web page. And, if you're like me, you find that when they fail to behave as expected, you as the user are not notified as to the reason. Instead, the page will just stare back at you blankly: no spinning globe, no twirling fox to indicate that it is processing your request. Of course, what's really happened is that your AJAX request caused an unhandled exception on the server and the request was canceled. If you're like me (and if you've read this far I am forced to conclude we must be twins) you'd like some visibility into that unhandled exception.

There is a quick and easy solution! Simply add the following to your ASPX code-behind and during your debugging session Visual Studio will report the exception being thrown, complete with the exception message and stack trace. If you'd like to report the exception to the user, you would wrap the inner call in a try/catch block and update your UI (or Logging) accordingly.

Good luck!

C#

protectedoverridevoidRaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler source, String eventArgument)
{
base.RaisePostBackEvent(source, eventArgument);
}

VB.NET
Protected Overrides Sub RaisePostBackEvent(ByVal source As IPostBackEventHandler, ByVal eventArgument As String)
MyBase.RaisePostBackEvent(source, eventArgument)
End Sub

Telerik Training in the best of Readers’ Choice Awards 2009

Lino Tadros — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:47:00 GMT

We, at Falafel Software, are very excited that for the second year in a row, Telerik training has won the ASP.NET PRO Readers’ Choice Award for Training. This year is extra special as the award went to the Telerik Trainer, a WPF based training tool Falafel developed for Telerik and has been gaining tremendous success and adaptability in the market since its release last year. Microsoft Germany has standardized on Telerik Trainer for all their Visual Studio Express offering on the MS Germany site.
Since 2006, Falafel Software has been providing all Telerik training & Consulting worldwide and it has been a tremendous honor and a rewarding relationship. Congratulations! to the Telerik team and the Falafel team as well! :)

Smarter ComboBoxes inside a Telerik WinForms RadGridView

Rachel Hagerman — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:23:56 GMT

Once again I’m sharing some tips and tricks for the Telerik RadGridView control; this time for your combobox editors inside the grid. The RadGridView makes it very easy to add combobox columns to your grids, and with these tips you can get an even smoother user experience.

For these examples, I’m using a sample form that uses some GridViewComboBoxColumns for the day of week and month fields.

Combobox dropdowns are great, but what if you want your users to be able to clear the field, and even assign a null value that you will store in your database? If the combobox datasource is a list generated elsewhere, you may want to add the blank value when the editor is initialized.

To add the blank item, handle the CellEditorInitialized event of the RadGridView. At this point, the combobox item list is already created, and a blank item can be inserted. Since the grid re-uses the editors, we first check that a blank item does not already exist. Here the blank item is inserted as the first item in the list.

void radGridView1_CellEditorInitialized(object sender, GridViewCellEventArgs e)
{  if ((e.ColumnIndex == 0) && (!(radGridView1.ActiveEditor as RadComboBoxEditor).Items.Any(
i => i.Text == String.Empty))) (radGridView1.ActiveEditor as RadComboBoxEditor).Items.Insert(
0, new RadComboBoxItem(String.Empty, null));

Now the user can choose the blank item, which will clear the cell and set the underlying data to null. Here the top row Day field has been cleared, and you can see the blank option in the dropdown.

The combobox can also be made more user-friendly by resizing the dropdown to always show all the items, as opposed to being bound to the size of the parent cell. If the control focus is on the column when the dropdown is opened, users may find the list too small to see the items.

The dropdown size can be managed from inside the same CellEditorInitialized handler as before. The viewport of the ListBox has a DesiredSize property which can be used to set the dropdown width. Here we’re also accounting for the width of the scrollbar, and setting to the calculated width only if it is larger than the cell’s width.

void radGridView1_CellEditorInitialized(object sender, GridViewCellEventArgs e)
{ if (e.ColumnIndex == 1) { RadComboBoxEditor rcbe
= radGridView1.ActiveEditor as RadComboBoxEditor; int _desiredWidth
= (int)rcbe.ListBoxElement.Viewport.DesiredSize.Width;
_desiredWidth += (rcbe.ListBoxElement.ScrollThickness); rcbe.DropDownWidth = Math.Max(rcbe.Size.Width,
_desiredWidth); } }

Now regardless of the width of the column, the dropdown will size to show the list items.

Actually, from inside the CellEditorInitialized handler, you can manipulate all the properties of the combobox just as if it were an independent control. Any special formatting, colors, or images can be added right there as well!

As always, you can find more help with Telerik’s RadGridView for WinForms on Telerik’s support site, or check out Falafel’s own training classes and consulting services .

TestComplete Data Driven Testing Webinar May 27, 2009

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:10:23 GMT

Tomorrow, May 27th 2009 from 9:30-11:00am PST, Falafel Software is holding a webinar on Data Driven Testing in TestComplete 7.0. The agenda for the webinar is as follows:

CSV population of data
Excel population of data
MS SQL Server population of Data
Windows and Web examples
Driver methods versus iteration methods in DDT
Realistic example of using DDT to solve real problems.

If you’re interested you can sign up here. The cost of the webinar is $29.