Telerik DevCraft – A Morning Dew Giveaway

Hello, readers!

It’s been a while since I have done a giveaway on The Morning Dew. Let’s kick off the summer with a big one.

Telerik DevCraft UI Edition

The Telerik DevCraft bundles include everything a Microsoft-centric developer needs to create great applications. The UI Edition contains over 420 controls covering web, desktop and mobile platforms. Here’s a list of the included packages:

DevCraft

Every edition of DevCraft includes the source code, product updates for one year and unlimited support tickets for one year.

I have been using Telerik products for a number of years now (primarily the WPF and Windows Phone products), and I have found their controls to be among the most intuitive and powerful available for .NET developers.

Be sure to check out some of their demos available online.

The Giveaway

The Morning Dew is giving away a DevCraft UI Edition license, a $1,299 value, to one lucky reader. Enter by leaving a comment on this post. In the comment, give us one of your best development productivity tips. Duplicate or multiple comments will not increase your chances of winning. Comments left through 11:59PM EDT on Friday, July 11th, 2014 will be eligible.

Winner will be selected at random from the eligible comments by Monday, July 14th. Please use a valid name and email address so that I can send it along to Telerik if you are chosen as the winner. Winner will be notified by a representative from Telerik shortly after they have been selected.

 

Good luck!

Alvin

 

103 thoughts on “Telerik DevCraft – A Morning Dew Giveaway”

  2. close all applications except for your IDE / Editor and a music player. play music that inspires you.

  4. My productivity tip, turn down the volume of noise sources and turn up the volume of your conscience… Or in other words, tell your boss to be conscious of the interruptions that is causing on the teams, don’t pick up the phone immediately, or if you do, tell that you’ll call later, advice your team members to have meetings in the appropriate place or to keep their voice down, and on the other hand, FOCUS on what you’re doing.

  5. DRY a.k.a. Don’t Repeat Yourself. There should only be one place in your application where any one fact or behavior is defined, and all other places should refer to that “single source of truth”. In my experience, deviating from this practice has caused more woe than any other oversight shy of null references. As soon as you make a duplicate, you introduce the possibility that one will change, and one will not — if that happens (oh, and it will), how is anyone else supposed to determine which is the “right” one?

  6. Telerik… any plans to continue the Software Craftsmanship calendar for 2015?

  8. Honestly, good search skills (aka Google-fu), combined with the ability to quickly read through . I spend a very large part of my time looking for useful libraries, code samples, and instructions on how to use a given API. I feel that cultivating those skills is an important part of being a modern programmer.

  10. TIP: Write the code that is related to your core business or core competency and have someone else write the rest. That’s why products like the Telerik DevCraft UI Edition bundle make so much sense. For example, if you’re in the insurance industry you should be writing code that is specific to the insurance industry and code that gives your company a competitive advantage in that industry. Writing grids, dropdowns, and calendar controls is a waste of your time and talent. Telerik (and other companies) like them, will be able to do that much better and much less expensively that you could ever hope. Concentrate on your core business!

  11. Noise Cancelling Headphones – seriously. I have a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 headphones and some days they are essential for getting anything done.

  13. Best tip – do it right the first time. It’s worth writing down your use case / requirement / desired behavior and shooting a copy to the PM / Systems Engineer / whoever before opening up your dev tool. At worst, a few minutes are wasted as you get a confirmation that you’re on the right track; at best, you get useful information that is critical to getting things perfect.

  15. Create classes with reuse in mind. You never know you might need the functionality (or some portion of it) again or be able to use it as a building block.

  16. Any pluralsight or free video tutorial on Telerik devcraft?

  18. Know and use supplementary tools to e.g. automate processes, run tests, generate documentation, and build packages. These save you time and sanity, and allow you to focus on your code.

  19. Work together, i.e. offer help to other developers and also make use of their knowledge and experience. That can be within your company (e.g. Code reviews), but also with developers all over the world via a platform like StackExchange.

  20. Use google and stackoverflow to investigate on problems and strange glitches, but never, never apply a proposed solution if you do not fully understand it. More often than not you will introduce a new, nastier bug.

  22. DON’T work late — you’ll only have to spend time the next day fixing all the stupid mistakes you made while you were tired.

  23. Do not let popularity to be the main factor for choosing which technologies and libraries are being used in you project.

  24. DRY. But i don’t mean don’t repeat yourself in the typical seance (code). What I mean is don’t repeat yourself full stop. In my opinion the best way to accomplish this is though education, constant education. I don’t just mean a college education, but that is a great start. I mean constant reading about and learning what your pears are doing and the trends in your chosen areas of expertise. Try to implement these new and exciting ideas and techniques in internal projects so you will know when to apply them to your production code. It doesn’t end there though. If you are not giving back to the community then you have plateaued. Write a blog, make podcast make a video it will make you re evaluate your position on the things that you thought you knew. There is nothing like realizing that you are not as smart as you thought you were to spur you on to becoming smarter.
    So in summary. Don’t just do what you have always done, or you will always get what you have always got. Do something new. DRY

  25. Don’t re-invent the wheel by coding everything from scratch. Stand on the back of giants!
    Use great tools and libraries built and tested by Telerik, Dundas, Rebex, etc.

  26. Always use a Profiling Tool. For example, if you use an ORM, always check the database query profiler! Performace, performance, performance!!!

  27. As a dev team leader, one of the best things you can do for your team is to regularly spend time coding with team members. Less experienced team members will benefit from you contributing your experience, while you get to stay in touch with the code base and gain valuable insight into each team member’s strengths and opportunities.

  28. No one uses Help in Visual Studio, so I repurposed the F1 key to Resharper’s GotoImplementation command. I can navigate around my code a lot quicker since its a very handy key and GotoImplementation is a great tool when working with projects with lots of layers.

    1. Did you write a VS extension for that? I’m highly interested.

  31. Pingback: Dew Drop – July 2, 2014 (#1807) | Morning Dew

  32. I always use Debug.Assert() everywhere; verify input parameters; verify state of structures before modifying them; verify results etc.

    You would be surprised at the number of bugs you can catch early on this way. Also long gone are the weird bugs that leave you scratching your head head, now how did this happen?

  37. Image Editor and RadWindow are the tool indeed ! No SDK installing, no coding, no designing…To be different, every Developer need these Tools !

  38. Headphones!! Especially when those around you like to sing, but can’t. Sometimes when I am working on a difficult section of code, I just put them in but don’t listen to anything just to keep the distractions down.

  40. My productivity tip is find something you can tune in and out from quickly and easily. Most people use music but I personally find playing some kinda video media like a TV series I have seen before works best for me. I am able to focus on the code because I have seen the show before, but if I get really stuck on a problem I can watch a bit of the show letting the back of my mind work on the problem. Once I have it sorted out I can tune back out from the show and back into the code easily.

  42. Code what you need. Love what you code. Test what you love. Track what you test. Chill. Listen to a track!

  43. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
    Leonardo da Vinci

  45. Start with a good set of requirements, then work towards those. No amount of awesome tools can fix wasted time on developing the wrong things/feature creep.

  46. One of the best development productivity tips I can say is to have an initial planning session with all stakeholders showcasing various demo mock ups, wire frames, etc, to get invaluable input early from everyone. Input such as UI and UX design needs and wants. Good planning can save a lot of headache, back and forth, and constant re-coding.

  47. Coffee and Linkin Park (or other loud music). Coffee helps me function and Linkin Park helps me work through issues when customers are ruining my day.

  48. Use the RadTooltipManager to automatically tooltipify each element that requires a tooltip.

  49. DevCraft UI is the most complete control library to make beautiful applications with huge productivity using Microsoft technologies for development.

  51. Power Naps and Rest. Do your body a favor and take a 15-minute power nap instead of a 5 Hour Energy. As you get older, you will find that your much better early in the morning, when your brain is rested, the other benefit… nobody bothers you from 4:00 to 8:00 in the morning.

  52. Make a prioritized list of tasks. Focus on the most important. I find by doing this I get more done.

  53. 2 Monitor, 1st-24 inch and 2nd-14 inch , A cup of cold coffee at late night when everyone is sleeping and i am the only one who is working alone in room and no noise in room gives the best productivity……

  54. Create modular classes with their functionality. Best thing usually is to proof out a class with a test program calling the class and it’s methods. Also good for creating tests against. Once proofed, employ in other projects by including the initial project to maintain code in one location.

  55. Use procmon while testing your application to identify potential I/O performance hits early, especially when referencing existing company libraries.

  58. The last day of propping code into production except for a QFE (Quick Fix Engineering – Bug Fix) is Wednesday. You just don’t want to put code into a data center on the last two days of the week. Why, its a sure fire way to ruin your weekend. Trying to fix something and trying to find people to rally on fixing a live site issue when they have left for the weekend is just no fun and a bad customer experience.
    Jeff

  59. TeamCity and Octopus Deploy, continuous integration and one-click deployments!

  62. Use a solid component pack to save time i.e. Telerik DevCraft!

  63. Use Telerik controls for WinRT and/or Windows Phone to create an awesome UI at no time

  65. Personally for me, one of the best productivity tips is to familiarize oneself with common code snippet shortcuts in Visual Studio and use those while coding. It saves me a lot of keystrokes and time.

  66. ctrl+Q to search the quick launch, find any option in VS without having to navigate the menus.

  67. Build a detailed tracing/logging option into any significant end user app, so it can be turned on to diagnose insidious problems…

  68. Install an SSD drive on your development PC. Particularly if you’re working on large projects this can make a noticeable improvement. Do it, you know you want to!

  69. Give JustCode a try. On large solutions R# tended to bog my system down. JustCode always runs without issue and I really like its brace/bracket structural highlighting connecting line feature.

  70. Just as professional gamers have keyboard shortcuts as 2nd nature to play competitively and efficiently, it is important to know visual studio (and even resharper) shortcuts by heart.

    Some examples I often use are:
    CTRL +SHIFT + F

    1. (pressed the comment button too early)

      Some examples are
      CTRL +SHIFT+F (Find in Files)
      CTRL+Click (Go to Definition)
      SHIFT+ALT+L (Go to current file in solution explorer, Resharper only)

  71. Install VsVim (or Vim if you don’t use visual studio) and take the time to learn to use it properly. You don’t have to learn to use all the features in one day but by taking it slowly and using one feature at a time you will find that your efficiency will shoot up and you’ll end up wishing you had the same functionality in every text box you ever use.

  72. Music, coffee, snacks, VS 2013,Telerik Windows Phone, and Telerik Design template for windows phone => great combination to create great application

  73. If you are a professional developer and work on a wide range of .NET technologies, you may want to chooser DevCraft UI Edition which includes all components for various .NET technologies.

  74. The best piece of advice I can share is always find at least one positive or good thing about the code and your team members. This means taking a few moments to appreciate what the real purpose of what you are doing and all the resources around you. My team is small, only 5 other people, and we make an effort to be positive and help each other.

  75. Applying TDD and the MVVM pattern on your Windows Phone applications make it great, and the only better thing than that is include Telerik Controls on it !

  77. Thanks for the opportunity. Telerik did a really good job on controls. Smart coding, not so much breaking changings and clear documentation. I love it !

  78. I love using Telerik for business. Tired to investigate again ans again the wheel. Be more productive and response to the users quickly. They are always amazed of the result that I give them. Use resharper snippets editor to type xaml code very fast.

  80. The best tip for developers is to adopt a mindset of lifelong learning and skills improvement.

    Specifically, the following should be your learning goals:
    1) Read at least 1 or 2 new-skill books each month (and drill into the example code and try hacking up your own),
    2) Review a few sections of 1 or 2 old-skill books each month (e.g., “The Art of Computer Programming” series),
    3) Learn a new API (i.e., library/framework) each quarter,
    4) Learn a new programming language (well, not just cursory!) each year,
    5) Learn how to use a new OS every few years,
    6) Learn OS, server, and network administration skills (so you know MORE than self-claimed “DevOps experts” and ALL the SysAdmins and NetAdmins).

    The last item is particularly useful, as it helps prevent disasterous deployments and your job from being endangered. (More than a few times, I’ve encountered developers who, for instance, write a database app, but cannot figure out how to deploy a database or subsequent patches to a database schema due to lack of SSMS, SQL scripting, and setup packaging skills. All too often, projects and companies fail because the setup packages are entrusted to a green out-of-college newbie, who doesn’t have the skills or experience.)

  81. Use code generator to generate code for you whenever possible, <3

  82. Newer use version 1 of any MS product always wait till SP or Update is available else you are basically MS tester

  83. Give consistent development information to customer. Call them directly if something bad happens. One way or another they will know the current status so it is best to give them (your superior or customer) correct information ASAP.

  85. Get down to basics. Turn off you monitor. Take a large paper, a pencil and eraser. Draw, sketch, flowchart, write raw code, decide the controls you are going to use, doodle, make a plan. Do whatever it takes on the paper to get your brain juices flowing. Immediately, turn on your monitor and start coding.

  86. Learn to google – if you get stuck it will be your best friend.

    Make it a point to keep up to date on new developments within the developer community (new tools, languages, version of software). Don’t do this when you need it right this second – do it before.

  87. Find a font and color scheme that makes you feel like you are crafting a physical thing;

  88. Learn your tools and keyboard shortcuts. Whether it’s just VS or VS extensions, learn what they can do and how to use them.

  89. Telerik DevCraft UI Edition is best toolset for Microsoft-centric development. We are using it for the past 5 years.

  92. Visual studio shortcuts
    Resharper find in file : Alt + \
    Goto definition F12
    Find usages Shift + F12

  93. Remember your workflows! Impact analysis for any development you do is key. If you have ANY concerns or doubts about whether what you’ve done may impact a workflow or product you’re not aware of, ASK.

    Better to do that work up front and make sure nothing is missed than to have to come back multiple times and waste development, QA, and design time to fix the unexpected issues that come up.

  96. Be business centric : demonstrate to your users that you are concerned about their business.
    Listen what they think they want and give them what they need.
    Never forget that if a solution is too complicated, it’s not the good solution
    Document code.
    Never forget that computing is a TOOL to help business going FURTHER !

  97. Productivity tip: Use Pomodoro to get into a more natural rhythm. I naturally get up and stretch somewhere between 25-45 minutes and do something totally unrelated (like take a walk) for 5-10 minutes. I am rewarded with many solutions to sticky development problems when I ‘put my hands in the air and step away from the keyboard.’

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