Keep your hands on the keyboard

This morning I was writing a link-rich blog post that involved cutting and pasting URLs from Firefox into my document.

Sounds simple enough, except that my hands were wandering all over the place, from keyboard to mouse to keyboard and back again. The amount of time I was wasting was incredible. Trouble is: I'd forgotten -- or didn't even know in the first place -- what the keyboard shortcut for the address bar was in Firefox. And I use Firefox all the time, every day.

So I decided on an experiment.

DevExpress at TechEd 2010: Rebuild - Restore - Renew

This week the DevExpress staff have travelled to Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans. Some four years ago, Microsoft made plans to hold the annual event in “Nawlins”. Unfortunately, after the devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused, there was no easy way to overcome the logistical difficulties that such a huge natural disaster had left in its wake.

2010 will see thousands of developers and IT professionals descend on the city. And as New Orleans continues to rebuild its economic infrastructure, with the help of stimuli like national conferences such as TechEd, DevExpress have scaled back and are doing our bit to help The Big Easy - one family at a time.

DevExpress at TechEd New Orleans

Community Project: Creating an OData Provider for XPO

OData is a web protocol for querying and updating data that uses web technologies to allow you to access information stored in a variety of sources. By applying technologies such as HTTP, AtomPub and JSON you are now able to expose data from relational databases, content management systems as well as traditional websites.

Azret is creating a series of blog posts that will show the development of a sample application in Silverlight using our DevExpress Channel data. You can join in with the project and find the full source code on Codeplex.

Get involved and work through the project with Azret, by following his blog series.

OData WCF Data Service Provider for XPO - Introduction OData WCF Data Service Provider for XPO - Part 1 OData WCF Data Service Provider for XPO - Part 2

New Functionality in AgLayoutControl

Visual Studio 2010 is out, and with it comes the Silverlight Designer. Vlad and the Silverlight team at DevExpress don’t like being left behind, so they’ve packed a heap of new functionality into the AgLayoutControl.

The improvements are designed to help you be more productive when building your UI and provide you with a better design-time experience.

Take a look. What do you think?

Silverlight Layout Control: Design-time Support in Visual Studio 2010

Experimenting with New VS2010 Toys - XPO and F#

It’s been a while since we saw Gary on the DevExpress Channel, but he’s back and is alongside a new and able assistant.

Visual Studio 2010 shipped with some great new features and functionality for developers. But this version of the IDE also marked the full-release of a brand new programming language ? F#. Although it has been around for some time, the official release of F# marks a decisive shift from OO programming towards a more functional approach.

Gary and Amanda discuss the functional approach to programming, and they also take a look at how XPO performs with F# in this new video from the DevExpress Channel.

Object Persistence with XPO and F#

WPF Data Grid Tutorials on the DevExpress Channel

Our WPF control set is continuing to gather momentum, and in this issue of DX Press: The DevExpress Newsletter, we have more tutorials to help you get up to speed with our controls for this new platform.

Amanda will take you through simple samples to show you how to work with fixed columns, as well as demonstrating how to bind to an OLAP cube using DXPivotGrid for WPF.

Get your coffee, and let’s get started.

Better Design Time Experience in v2010 vol 1 Binding to an OLAP Cube Introducing Hit Testing in v2010 vol 1 Using Fixed Columns