Blogs
Systenics Website Relaunch
Our older website was starting to show age and unable to keep pace with styles. We had several internal discussions regarding a re-design but usually ended up shelving the plan since we were unable to identify and justify the reason for re-design if the outcome would just be a better design. At times we thought of just purchasing a template and updating the content and finish the process.
Latest Posts
Getting Hired at Systenics as Fresher
This post is coming out of our need to constantly be on the watch to hire fresh talent. We are always in need of great talent, I think every organization is. Good employees are our biggest assets and we value them the most in this organization. We are in the business of showcasing excellence. And thus our employee's brilliance is our only wealth. Hiring an employee is a ritual of expanding our family and it has to be carefully achieved. This post is for the candidates who want to be the part of a company that values their talent the most. Following is the interview process that we follow. Step 1: Apply for Job, Step 2: Shortlisting and Getting called for Interview, Step 3: Technical Interview - Round One, Step 4: Psychometric Evaluation and Aptitude Test - Round Two, Step 5: Personal Interview - Round Three, Step 6: Interview with CEO - Round Four
Continue readingCreate a Grid View with paging and sorting feature using ASP.NET MVC Razor and LINQ
Recently, I came across a requirement to create a Grid View with paging and column sorting feature. Since, I was using ASP.NET MVC there was no server side control such as Repeater, GridView or DataList which are available in ASP.NET. I googled but didn’t come across a good solution except few third-party paid ASP.NET MVC controls. So finally I decided to code my own Grid View with support for paging and column sorting with help from information available on blogs and forums. Even though I am showing the code in context of an example its extensible enough to reuse it elsewhere.
Continue readingSetting up Umbraco 6 in Visual Studio 2012 for MVC development
The starter packs provided on the Umbraco 6 default installation are good, but in case you need to build a complete new UI design as per your clients requirements then its far easier to start with a blank slate rather than try to mend an existing design to suit your requirements. If you want to move further and start developing forms etc. then its best to setup Umbraco 6 as a Visual Studio project so that you can debug your code. Umbraco provides two kinds of rendering engines for your pages, it can work in traditional Web Forms (its default engine) as well as it can user Razor with MVC. I personally find the HTML generated by MVC to be much clean, and better suited for building responsive html5 based applications. In this short blog post I am detailing the steps required to setup Umbraco 6 in Visual Studio 2012 as well as configure it to use MVC rendering engine. This blog post seeks to serve as a starting point for various other Umbraco development post that I plan to write.
Continue readingGenerate Sitemap using Umbraco 6 CMS and ASP.NET MVC Razor code
Sitemap is still considered one of the most important element of Website development. Google and Bing do provide an option to reference your website sitemap so that their bots can traverse through all the links. But, most developers or website administrators often forget to include it. In this blog post, I will explain the steps to create a Sitemap using Umbraco 6, ASP.NET Partial View and Razor code. This article assumes that you have Umbraco 6 configured to use Mvc as the default rendering engine so that MVC Partial Views can be used.
Continue readingBundle and Minify CSS/JS using ClientDependency in Umbraco 6 MVC/Razor
This is going to be a short post on how to configure style sheets and JavaScript's bundling and minification in Umbraco 6 using ClientDependency framework in MVC. The benefits of bundling and minification are obvious as they reduce the number of HTTP requests as well as decrease the download size of resources to the browser resulting in a faster browsing experience. While Microsoft has prebuilt its own libraries to enable these features, Umbraco uses the ClientDependency framework to achieve the same. You can read more about the client dependency framework from its codeplex website, its got quite a few configurations options and you and read more about them on its website. In this post I am just going to focus on getting an initial configuration up and running since there seems to be lack of clear documentation on the topic and it took me a while too to figure how to set it up correctly. This article assumes that you already have a installation of Umbraco 6 and have configured its rendering engine to use ASP.NET MVC for the pages.
Continue readingSync SQL Server 2012 Data with SQL CE 3.5 SP2 over the Internet using WCF Services using MS Sync Framework v2.1
Recently, we were working on a client project where the client required multiple Windows Based Client Applications to be able to work offline and synchronize with the master MS SQL Database (hosted on the internet), when internet connection is available. We faced several challenges in building this application and I thought it would be a good idea to blog the solution we created for the client. In this post we have tried to build upon the samples provided by Microsoft but explain the whole process so that its easier for others to understand and implement this platform. This blog post does not try to explain in detail how sync framework works, but tries to explain the deployment and creation of WCF based web service to sync between server and clients over the internet.
Continue readingCreate navigation menu in Umbraco 6 using ASP.NET MVC Partial View and Razor
I was recently faced with the challenge of implementing a navigation menu in Umbraco 6, it was very difficult to search creditable samples which worked in Umbraco 6. In this blog post, I will explain the steps to create a navigation menu using partial view as you can see on current Systenics website. Besides linking the pages, we also wanted to display a help text for each menu item. Umbraco 6 provides several ways to implement the same, you could either use Macros, but I have chosen to write a MVC Partial View. This article assumes that you have Umbraco 6 configured to use Mvc as the display engine so that MVC Partial Views can be used.
Continue readingUncheck Radio Button in WPF
Recently I found myself in need of uncheck my selected Radio Button in WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). Unfortunately Radio Button has an unchecked event but it doesn’t fire. I thought of implementing uncheck onClick event, but even in this case it always givesChecked valuetrue after clicking on Radio Button. I started searching for examples in internet, but didn’t find an appropriate way to achieve this. One way I thought of styling the Checkbox to look like a Radio Button, but doing so is also had few issues. Then I thought of extending the Radio Button and use Dependency Property to achieve the same. This article describes the implementation of the Radio Button that supports uncheck and the way you can use it in your own applications. You can find the full implementation ofRadioButtonExtensionclass in the attached demo.
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