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Responsive design isn’t just about CSS breakpoints anymore. When you’re working inside classic ASP.NET WebForms — especially with Telerik controls — you have an extra layer of intelligence available to you: server-side device detection. Instead of waiting for the browser to decide how your layout should behave, Telerik lets you detect the visitor’s device size on the server and adjust your UI before the page even renders.
This is incredibly useful when you’re dealing with controls like RadSiteMap, RadMenu, or RadGrid, where layout decisions often need to be made early in the page lifecycle. The snippet below shows exactly how to detect a small-screen device and automatically switch your site map into a single-column layout for mobile users. |
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Creating clean, readable navigation is one of the small but important details that shape a polished ASP.NET WebForms UI. Telerik’s RadMenu is a powerful control, but one thing it has never shipped with is a built-in “separator” item—something many developers expect when organizing grouped menu items. Fortunately, RadMenu is flexible enough to let us create our own separator using a standard RadMenuItem and a bit of CSS. In this article, we’ll walk through how the separator works, why Telerik designed the control this way, and how to implement a simple, reliable divider in a real-world RadMenu configuration. |
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| Clearing and disabling a Telerik RadDropDownList sounds simple, but if you’ve worked with Telerik controls in ASP.NET WebForms, you already know they don’t always behave like standard dropdowns. Auto-binding, view state, and stored selections can all cause the control to “remember” values you thought you removed. When you need the dropdown to be visually empty and completely inactive, you want a reliable, server-side pattern that works every time. This article shows the simplest, most predictable way to clear a RadDropDownList and disable it in one step. |
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Often, lookups are simple. But in some cases, the table that we're doing the lookup against is too big to display in a web page, especially a mobile device.
This is a template for a web lookup that displays a grid, and filter fields to narrow down the data to select from. In our example the data will be an item lookup against a table with 25k records. |
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| Comparing two files in Visual Studio is something every developer needs, yet the built-in options are surprisingly hidden. Most people assume you need an extension, but Visual Studio already includes a powerful diff viewer—you just have to know where to find it. In this article, we’ll walk through two fast, reliable ways to compare files using features that ship with Visual Studio: the Command Window’s Tools.DiffFiles command and the Solution Explorer “Compare Selected” option. Once you know where these tools live, you can launch a diff in seconds without installing anything extra. |
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When you build data-heavy ASP.NET WebForms pages, the Telerik RadGrid quickly becomes the workhorse of your UI. But the moment you need a dropdown inside a grid, you hit a fork in the road: do you use a TemplateColumn with a RadComboBox, or do you switch to a RadDropDownColumn?
On paper, both options solve the same problem. In practice, they behave very differently. One gives you total control but demands more wiring. The other is fast to configure but far less flexible. And depending on your data-binding strategy, one of them can quietly become a performance bottleneck.
This article breaks down the two approaches side-by-side—how they bind, how they render, how they behave during postbacks, and which one actually makes your life easier when you’re maintaining a real-world application. |
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Telerik’s RadTextBox doesn’t show the EmptyMessage in italics when the control is both disabled and empty. If you rely on disabled fields to show placeholder-style hints, this creates a visual inconsistency. Here’s the simple workaround I use in production. |
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| When a RadGrid loads with grouped data, it often shows too much detail by default. If you want a cleaner first impression, you can collapse all groups on initial load with one simple event. |
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RadEditor started injecting unwanted <span> and font-size tags into my article text — usually after deleting and retyping. The styling blended in, so I didn’t notice at first, but once I did, it became impossible to ignore. Telerik support pointed me to a simple fix.
The issue wasn’t RadEditor itself — it was the browser inserting inline styles during editing, especially in Chrome/Edge. |
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The Telerik RadAutoCompleteBox uses an Entries collection to represent the items a user has selected. Understanding how Entries works is essential when binding data, loading saved values, or reacting to user selections during postbacks or AJAX requests.
Personally, I've only ever used it in 'single' entry mode, but it is pretty versatile and allows a lot more than that.
If you're not familiar with the RadAutoCompleteBox, go to the menu and read that article first.
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Making a Telerik RadGrid Button Column Sortable Using a Template Column
Sorting in Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX RadGrid works smoothly—until you introduce a GridButtonColumn. Because button columns don’t bind directly to a data field, the grid has nothing concrete to sort on. The practical fix is to replace the button column with a GridTemplateColumn that looks and behaves like a button column, but sorts on a real field from your data source. It’s simple, predictable, and uses RadGrid’s built-in sorting pipeline. |
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Introduction
Cookies are one of the simplest ways to persist small pieces of data between requests in ASP.NET, yet they’re often misunderstood or implemented inconsistently. Whether you’re storing user preferences, tracking the last selected database, or managing lightweight session helpers, cookies give you a fast, reliable mechanism without involving server resources. This article walks through the essentials—how to set a cookie, how to read it safely, and how to delete it when it’s no longer needed—using clean, practical VB.NET examples you can drop directly into your application.
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Overview
When a RadGrid is running in Batch Edit mode, the standard
GridDropDownColumn often doesn’t behave correctly — especially when you need
full control over how the dropdown is populated or when the editor must bind dynamically.
To avoid those limitations, the most reliable approach is to switch to a
GridTemplateColumn and embed a RadDropDownList inside the edit template.
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Introduction
Styling the Telerik ASP.NET RadComboBox can be frustrating because the control ships with deeply layered skins, sprite images, and browser-specific rules that override your CSS. If you’ve ever tried to set a simple background color only to have Telerik’s theme snap it back, you’re not alone. This article gives you a set of targeted CSS overrides that reliably control the ComboBox’s enabled and disabled states without breaking the rest of the skin. The goal is simple: predictable styling, clean overrides, and no more fighting with hidden gradients or opacity rules. |
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