I am writing this blog post from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, onboard the Disney Magic, heading to Europe with my wife and kids.  That means this post is costing me a fortune :)

 

The great thing about a TransAtlantic cruise, is the amount of time you get to sit down in the veranda listening to the sound of waves and reflecting on your life while projecting into the future.

I consider myself one of the luckiest men alive. I have a wonderful wife, wonderful kids, I work with the best in the business, I run a very ...

You can now head to Sitefinity Lightning page to download the latest Server and Client to enable working with Sitefinity 6.0

Lightning is extremely easy to install and configure and essential for any blogger.  The tool is still in Beta (0.9.9.1) and keeps getting updated with great new features regularly.

This site is now running in the Windows Azure Cloud on Sitefinity 6.0
Be careful with some migration issues from 5.x to 6.0:
1- The Nuget NewtonJson package has to be refreshed other wise you will get a yellow screen of death about a security issue with the Json contract.
2- You need to disable your Lightning module in the SystemConfig.Config file, until Telerik releases a new Package for Lightning that is compatible with Sitefinity 6.0
3- If you use ECommerce and customized something, be very aware, several breaking changes occurred in 6.0.  Quite annoying honestly :(

Other than that, ...

I received today my certification for SeeTest, a great product for testing iOS an Android applications.

If you are in the market for testing applications natively on iOS, Android and many other platforms using object recognition, download the trial and see how powerful this tool is all about.

I will be speaking on the topic at FalafelCON 2013 on June 10th at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA.  Hope you can join us.

Don't miss this wonderful conference next month (May 23rd & 24th) in Cluj, Romania if you are in Eastern Europe.  Great speakers, great organizers and great all around people, incredibly hospitable and truly kind.

I regret not be able to join this year because of prior engagement but I will make sure to keep May open next year in 2014 to repeat my wonderful experience of last year.

Enjoy the sessions and say hi to all my friends in Romania speaking or organizing this year.

 

I love using the Sitefinity Lightning tool to write my blogs in Sitefinity.  The tools is easy to install, configure and is getting better and better in every release.

One of the annoying issues is that the Lightning assembly that needs to be included on your Sitefinity site, is not always compiled with the latest and greatest of Sitefinity patches and once the Telerik.Sitefinity.dll and its family of assemblies change the version number, it pretty much breaks Lightning when you deploy.

 An easy way to fix this is to add a runtime section to you Sitefinity web.config file to ...

For the last 4 years and 3 months, I have been enduring the stress and pain of surgically placing a Lap Band around my stomach in order to lose weight.

The operation on December 13^th 2008 almost cost me my life, but with a lot of prayers from friends and family all around the globe, I was able to survive it and get out of my 3.5 weeks of induced coma in the ICU at Good Samaritan hospital in Los Gatos, CA.

I lost 128 pounds in the last 4 years and 3 months because of the operation, so ...

I upgraded this site today to 5.4 SP1 (5.4.4010).  It is running int he Azure Cloud as a Service.
The Site's backend is extremely fast based on the new changes and optimiaztions to the pre-compiled headers and templates in 5.4 SP1.
We are still waiting for the Lucene for Azure to be implemented for Search to work in the cloud by the Sitefinity team.
Over all, the performance is impressive and the Sitefinity product keeps getting better and better.
Go Sitefinity Team!

During the last month, we have been hard at work releasing multiple mobile applications for MVCS (Monte Vista Christian School) in Watsonville, CA.  MVCS was the FIRST school in the USA to integrate iPAD into their curriculum a couple of years ago.

The need to have quick access to the school's calendars, staff's emails, phone numbers, maps and directions, besides the mission and goal of the school was very high from mobile devices.

We started with the iPAD, no surprise there, and the application was very well received by the MVCS staff and parents at the school.  We went ahead ...

I am writing my first blog post fromt the great new Sitefinity Lightning 0.95 for Sitefinity 5.3 that was released an hour ago.  It works great on my site hosted in the Azure Cloud and looks great as well.

   

Great job Telerik Team!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

I wrote a letter to Santa this morning and placed it under the Christmas tree. First, I thanked Santa for bringing me Sitefinity 5.3 early this year, but as a demanding child I asked for more :).  I asked for a new release for Sitefinity Lightning that will work with Sitefinity 5.3.
Guess what?  Santa (Saint Georgi) confirmed that today (Wednesday, December 19th 2012) Santa will make a special delivery to all Sitefinity children of the world with an amazing build of Lightning with lots of magical surprises :)
Enjoy the new release folks! 
Batteries not included

It was a pleasure to present at Microsoft in Mountain View on the topics of Live Tiles, Lockscreens, Portable Libraries between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and finally on NFC communications.

Thank you to all the attendees that shared that day with us and also to all the developers that participated in the LiveStreaming from the http://thesociablegeek.com/events/windows-phone-8-phone-camp-live/

Also Thank You ! to Daniel Egan for asking to present on these topics, I had a great time!

Please download the Slides of the session from here.

Please download the code used during the session from the following URL:

1- ...

Join me at the MGM Grand Hotel in Vegas on Dec 12th for a full day workshop on Windows Phone 8 Development.  Bring your laptop and let's get crancking!

DevIntersection is being born and is organized by some of the best in the industry.  If you register by Nov 20th you will receive a new Microsoft Surface RT for free !!!!!

My Workshop on the 12th will go over tons of materials, tips and tricks and some surprises :)

• Windows Phone 8 introduction

• New Hardware and Hyper V emulator

• Hello WP8 app in XAML

• Hello WP8 app in HTML 5 ...

Congratulations to President Obama and all my Democratic friends in the USA.  I pray for him and his cabinet and wish him well for our nation's sake.

I did not vote for President Obama yesterday.  I have been a republican for the last 22 years that I have lived in the USA and I always voted republican except once, in 2008, I voted FOR President Obama as I was looking for a change as well and I believed very strongly that he had what it takes to bring the right and the left together.

I see and hear a lot ...

On Friday, November 9th, I will be at the Microsoft largest Hackathon in Sunnyvale speaking on Windows Phone 8 Development and also available in the back of the room to help attendees with their questions and app problems whether they are Windows 8 XAML or HTML5/JS or Windows Phone 8 apps.

It is FREE!, so head to Sunnyvale at the Silicon Valley Moffett Towers and a get a day of Windows 8 and WP8 and even win prizes and awards for building fantastic apps.

I will have my Surface, my Nokia 920 and my HTC 8X with me for attendees ...

What a week!  Between the release of the Windows Phone 8 in San Francisco, the Build 2012 conference in Redmond and the first Windows Phone 8 Development workshop in Vegas, I had so much fun, too exhausted and very excited!

 

What a week for Microsoft, they should be very proud, they have been very busy lately with Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Azure cloud platform.

My workshop in Vegas yesterday went from 9:00 am till 4:00 pm but I think I could have gone for at least another 10 hours to show everyone all the incredible stuff ...

Microsoft just released the new Windows Phone 8 platform, Congratulations!

"The Windows Phone 8 is NOT for everyone, it is for EACH one of us"

I am in San Francisco listining to Joe Belfiore giving birth to Windows Phone 8.  Usually Mothers and Fathers don't like to tell people they are expecting till after the first trimester, in this case, Father Joe Belfiore, waited till the end of the 3rd trimester :)

Windows Phone 8 running the kernel from Windows rather than from Windows CE (WP7), that is very good news!

Windows Phone 8 will run on new hardware, still ...

Well, it is not just Sitefinity sites that can benefit from this as a lot of times, web sites and web applications will include an "images" folder that contain dozens of images that are not optimized for the web.

There are tools out there that will optimize your images or entire folder of images by removing the EXIF information in the image and other optimization techniques in order to reduce the size of these images for best load time in browsers.

Sites such as smushit.com and punypng.com will do the trick but they take time for the process to take ...

The week of June 15th 2013 is going to be a very special week for Sitefinity Developers, Designers and Admins.  Falafel Software is organizing a 2 day conference for Sitefinity at the Grand Wailea Resort on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

This is an invitation to the Sitefinity community to mark your calendars!

We will have great speakers from Telerik, Falafel, other partners and known Sitefinity experts from all over the world.

So go ahead, jump on the survey page of the conference and let us know what you think, it is very important that we create the sessions ...

I am excited to share that while Windows 8 is being released in 2 days (October 26th 2012) and Falafel Software already has 4 applications certified and ready to go in the Windows Store, the Falafel Sitefinity Hub for Windows 8 got approved in the store and is ready to be downloaded and enjoyed for FREE by everyone with a Windows 8 device including a Surface.

You can read more about the HUB on this demo site for more details.

The HUB was built using the release version of Telerik RadControls for Windows 8 where we utilized the excellent ...