Rachel Hawley's DevExpress Community Blog

August 2009 - Posts

• XAF: Community Bloggers Supporting Their Own

  Here at DevExpress we happen to think XAF is a pretty great framework for creating Winform and Webform applications. You may consider us a little biased, but you only have to look at XAF’s loyal band of enthusiastic followers to see that it isn’t just Gary Short who loves to blog about his favourite development framework. Whether it’s Apostolis Bekiaris with his great series of XAF tips, or Alex Hoffman with his look at what his favourite framework is bringing to the party in its latest version, these enthusiastic users do us a great service by helping our new users get up the learning curve with XAF. Of course it doesn’t stop there, and nor would you expect it too, because just as XAF delivers more than you would expect from a framework, so too do its users. Not only do they write blog posts highlighting certain aspects of XAF but some, like Gary Cox, take it further. Gary has written custom rule for XAF validation that will let you conditionally require a property and he gives the source away on his blog. We are always grateful to users such as these who give us and the community help of this sort, and in turn we are happy to give them a loud hailer to spread their work out even further. Please remember to drop us a line and tell us about your blogs and posts, as we’ll be only too happy to publicise your work. If you’re feeling the love for social media sites, you can also publish your own work on our DevExpress FaceBook page. In the meantime, keep having fun with the best development framework there is! Posted Aug 25 2009, 07:13 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 2 comment(s)

• DevExpress XtraGrid Streaks Ahead in Visual Studio Magazine Awards

  DevExpress are proud to be recognised as grid component leaders by the readers of Visual Studio Magazine in their 2009 Buyers' Guide. DevExpress’ XtraGrid Suite pulled in nearly twice as many votes as its nearest competitor – that is an amazing result and very flattering indeed! Over 700 individual tools were submitted across 23 different categories, and DevExpress are thrilled that Visual Studio Magazine readers voted the XtraGrid Suite and the ASPxGridView Suite their Readers’ Choice Winners for the best Desktop and Web Grid Components. Voters went on to give praise to our often unsung heroes in the DevExpress Support Team:  “DevExpress has some of the best support that I’ve ever come across” and “They are quick to answer and they always thoroughly investigate your issue to come up with the best workaround or fix possible”. The Visual Studio Magazine 2009 Readers’ Choice Awards honour the very best third-party tools, components and frameworks, as selected by one of the most knowledgeable developer audiences you can find: Visual Studio Magazine subscribers. DevExpress solutions were also awarded Merits by voters in the following categories: DXperience™ Subscriptions - Merit Award - Desktop and Web Component Suites CodeRush™ for Visual Studio - Merit Award - Development Tools ASPxTreeList™ Suite - Merit Award - Web Forms UI Components We’d like to extend our thanks to the readers of Visual Studio Magazine, and our DevExpress customers and supporters for their continued loyalty. We look forward to continuing to meet and exceed your development needs with the DXperience v2009.2 release … coming to your Client Centre accounts soon!      Posted Aug 13 2009, 05:02 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 2 comment(s)

• CodeRush Blogging: So Much to Say, Not Enough Time to Say it

  When it comes to blogging, nothing lights the proverbial fire under our DevExpress fans quite like CodeRush. And often there is so much good stuff to say about it, that there just isn’t time enough to say it all before the next online wave hits, and more great resources are washed ashore for the global tech community to collect their treasures from. It is times like these when I wish I could stick a cork in the World Wide Web and have it stop showering me with content for a while until I can catch up. And so I have … well, in actual fact I’ve just turned off my broadband internet connection, shut down Outlook and left just one page of IE open while I write this post. This week I have noticed that CodeRush has really gotten under the skin of one of the DX Squad – Rory Becker. Not only is he part of your one-stop shop for CodeRush knowledge on Twitter, he is also flooding the DevExpress Facebook page with great content on his favourite IDE plugin. Nice work Rory! Along with the DevExpress blogs, Rory’s Ramblings is a great resource for CodeRush users and enthusiasts. I wanted to stop a while and highlight them for anyone else who got washed away with the tide of blog content. A couple of Rory’s most recent CodeRush-related posts include: CodeRush Templates – What makes them different? How to: Bind a key in CodeRush But the pièce de résistance has to be this absolute corker: New CodeRush Plugin: CR_MethodPreview Overhearing some of our other DevExpress users discussing a plugin they’d like to see, Rory decided to step in and get down and dirty with some code to see what he could do to help. The outcome, according to happy user Joe Hendricks, was “an AWESOME plugin”. We want to provide a platform for others to promote ideas, tips, tricks and anything else that sparks your enthusiasm. Don’t hide your lights under bushells guys, get blogging! These posts are a fantastic reference resource for other users, and I am sure that there are many more out there who are just as passionate as Rory. When you’ve got a stonking post, make sure to share it on the DevExpress Facebook page and let others bask in the rays of your technical genius. You don’t have to be head and shoulders above Mark Miller to make someone’s day with your ideas. Posted Aug 12 2009, 04:53 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 2 comment(s)