Sorry for the bloody, our new IT director is Australian.  Blame him…

Anyway, I love the Telerik RAD Controls, but I had a devil of a time trying to figure out how to hide the stupid week numbers on the calendar.  I don’t really think they serve much of a purpose, and one of our users asked that they just be removed.  Unfortunately, they’re not called “Week Numbers” in the properties.  To hide them, you have to change “Show Row Headers” to false.  Come on Telerik, why can’t that be at the top of the documentation online.  It seems to me that the default should be off anyway, as I would argue most people don’t need to see week numbers, or select weeks at a time from a DatePicker.

So, this is my reminder… :)

Well, it really works ONCE you figure out how to do it…

On the app I’m currently developing, I was looking for some way to give visual feedback that a postback had occurred in an UpdatePanel.  We use ASP.NET AJAX for most of the AJAX stuff we do, as to be honest, it’s easy and works well for what we need.  Since I use small UpdatePanels to take care of most of the heavy lifting of AJAX, I wanted to just give a visual confirmation when a panel had been updated.  In this case, the control was a CheckBoxList that is updated either via adding a new item to the list or by changing what’s checked on it. 

The nice part was that once I actually figured out how to get the code working correctly, it was really easy to implement.  A few things I found that may be obvious, but aren’t specifically stated:

1. The target control HAS to be an UpdatePanel.  I know it should seem obvious, but for some reason, it didn’t click in my head. 
2. As the Animation controls are actually XML markup, the tags must be CAPITALIZED.  Specifically, I found that the <OnUpdating> and <OnUpdated> tags have to be capitalized, or the code returns a bit of a strange error.
3. If you put an <OnUpdating> tag in your code, you HAVE to add an actual Animation to it.  It can’t just be empty.

It must be said, the XML syntax for doing animation isn’t NEARLY as friendly to use as, say, jQuery UI, but once you get used to it, it works quite well.

I’d recommend you try it in order to make your applications that much more responsive.

As a development team, we have decided (well, I guess officially, I have decided) to go with Subversion as our version control system, as opposed to using Visual Studio Team System.  We had previously used VSTS, and the locking method of source control just did not work for us.  We much prefer the methodology that Subversion uses, namely modify-merge, rather than lock.  It just makes more sense!

We’re using TortoiseSVN as our client and so far, I’m very impressed with it’s ease of use and the ability to have it do the things we want to do.

We had to come to grips with the terminology (Commit, Merge, Update, Diff, Import, etc.) and thanks to the free e-Book Version Control with Subversion we have been well educated.  I have to say though, why can’t Microsoft get this?  Why does VSTS have to be:

1. so difficult to administer?
2. so cumbersome to use on a daily basis in a team setup?
3. based on the lock methodology, which seems counterproductive to the idea of collaborative development?

It seems they could learn a ton from this open source project.  Oh well, either way, we’ll use Subversion, enjoy it, and get more done.

BTW, we’re looking at VisualSVN for integration with Visual Studio 2008.  I’ve played with the demo, but part of me just doesn’t see paying for what we can do in the filesystem for free.  Ideas/thoughts?