The Falafel team is very excited to announce the opening of the Falafel Software offices in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

On Friday, I travel with several of my colleagues at Falafel from the USA to celebrate the opening of the new offices in the DIC (Dubai Internet City).

We have been hard at work completing all the legal requirements, finding the perfect offices and forming new alliances in the UAE to hit the ground running starting December 1st in this vibrant and exciting city!

On Monday November 25th, I will be speaking at the Microsoft GULF offices at the ...

I decided for my sanity to move away from hosting my Sitefinity blogs in the Azure Cloud and go with a regular server instead. 

This week, Pluralsight released my second course on Sitefinity called “Introduction to Sitefinity Development”.  My first course was an introduction to Sitefinity for the users’ perspective.

Around Christmas, Pluralsight will release my 3rd course on “Advanced Development  with Sitefinity”.

The module topics for the Advanced course will be:

1. Using Kendo UI in Sitefinity
2. Using MVC in Sitefinity
3. Pure Javascript widgets in Sitefinity
4. Dynamic Types ins and outs
5. Developing Form Fields in Sitefinity
6. Developing Sitefinity Workflows in WF4

What else would be of interest in the advanced topics that you would like to see covered in my 3rd Pluralsight Sitefinity ...

I have been following very closely all the ordeals about the Government's fumble over the alleged HealthCare.gov web site.

500 million lines of code? really? more than Windows, OSX and Linux combined? to build a web site?

I had to dive in and read more about the architecture, code snippets that can be found on the web and the integration points that caused this to be a massive failure.

I was surprised to see how bad the architecture was and the enormous amount of useless and repeated code that caused this over blown project to cost so much money and ...

For the 7th year in a row, I had the pleasure to speak at DevReach, the main Microsoft based Technical conference in eastern Europe put together by our friends at Telerik in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The hospitality is unbelievable and the kindness of the Bulgarians is out of this world.  Thank you to all the speakers, organizers, attendees, and most of all Telerik for always making us feel like super stars!

Dinner with the Sitefinity team the night before my flight back to the US and watching a Football game between a Bulgarian team and a Croatian team live.  Bulgaria won!...

 

We are very excited to release the new Falafel book on Sitefinity 6   Our 550 page e-book is available as an instant download and in it you'll find sections geared towards each type of Sitefinity roles: Sitefinity Users will learn how to: Add new pages and edit content Create E-mail campaigns Setup and manage an e-commerce storefront Localize pages to any language Sitefinity Administrators will learn how to: Configure common settings Personalize Sitefinity for particular user segments Manage installed modules Setup Responsive Web Design Create users Configure role based security Define workflows Use Site Synchronization Multisite management Retrieve ...

On Tuesday, October 8th 2013 at 6:00 PM, I will present the new “AcademicApps” framework for schools to be able to manage, publish, modify and update live mobile applications on iOS, Android, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 directly from a CMS based system on the Azure Cloud. We will spend some time talking about the architecture and demo the different tiers of the applications including the client side which is built in Telerik Icenium and the KendoUI framework. 

See you all there at the Microsoft office in San Francisco

Microsoft San Francisco (in Westfield Mall where Powell meets ...

Daniel Egan, a great friend from SoCal and a Microsoft DPE Manager transferred his long time ownership of DotNetDoc.com to me this week.  Thank You! Daniel!

We have lots of ideas here at Falafel Software of where to take this domain going forward but we are interested in your feedback as well.  What would you like to see from Falafel regarding this domain?

I am happy to report that the Telerik team in Bulgaria sent me a manual script to apply in order to resurrect my web site from the ashes :)

Upgrading Sitefinity 6.0 to 6.1 DID NOT go smooth for me and my site has been down for 48 hours, sorry about that folks.

The first problem is that the MVC upgrade from 3.0 to 4.0 did not take place while the site is being upgraded using the Sitefinity project manager.  It is something that I had to do manually for several DLLs that have to do with MVC and Razor ...

I miss my friends in Egypt so much.  Reading and seeing all the hatred, killing and chaos going on in the country of my birth is breaking my heart.  I wish there is something I could do to help, maybe writing this blog post is a small contribution to stand next to all my friends that are going through all of these difficult times in Egypt.

My dear American friends, what happened in Egypt last week is NOT a military coup.

Egypt's population is over 84 Million, over 33 Million Egyptians protested on June 30th to end the colossal failure ...

This week has been a very special and emotional week for me and the Falafelites.  We celebrated 10 years of Falafel Software!

The amazing part is that over 70% of the employees of Falafel have been with me for at least 7 of these 10 years.

Two of them have been with me the whole 10 years, Noel Rice and Adam Anderson.

The tremendous success of Falafel is due to the quality and loyalty of its employees over the years.  We accomplished so much together and reached a level of expertise that is respected and admired by many companies all ...

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 ...