Set the Plentiful Free, Сharge for the Scarce

A month or so ago, I was doing some research into the ecosystem of the Apple AppStore. I'm sure you've seen the same kinds of analyses where the top hundred paid apps are making something like 99% of the revenues and the other hundreds of thousands of apps are not even breaking even for their developers. A hockey stick graph, they're called.

Now, assuming that you do want to make a living writing apps for smartphones and since it's extremely unlikely that you'll do so, what can you do to improve your revenues?

Jumpstarting a Free DevExpress Webinar Series with ASP.NET MVC

DevExpress Developer Evangelist, Steve Andrews, clearly has rockets in his pockets. Barely a week into his new role with us and he is offering you a fantastic opening webinar on ASP.NET MVC, completely free of charge.

Steve will be offering a live, “getting started” webinar that will explore some of the reasons that you might want to take a closer look at ASP.NET MVC.

Space is limited on the live webinar so register your place now!

Free DevExpress Webinar: Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC

EXCLUSIVE: XPO to Include Stored Procedure Support

It's simple. Our XPO users asked for this, and finally it is scheduled to make its appearance in v2010 vol 2.

Support for stored procedures has, for some time, been an essential requirement for many of you dealing with data access in your organization.

In this post, Gary explains the two mechanisms that the XPO development team have implemented to provide you with this all-important addition.

We are really excited to be able to bring you this news. Do leave your comments in the post and tell us what you think.

XPO – Stored Procedure Support

More DXperience Updates and the Unveiling of XAF 10.2 at BASTA!

For all our eager German friends, this week at the BASTA! Conference in Mainz, Germany, Gary will be showing off the latest updates to the eXpress App Framework.

If you’re attending this conference and you want to find out more about what you can expect in the next release of DXperience, stop by the DevExpress booth and get a whirlwind tour of the latest news.

For those of you that we can’t speak to in person, we’ve got more news regularly dropping on the all new DevExpress Community Site. Here are the latest previews.

A new gallery control for WPF and Silverlight An overview of the WPF and Silverlight gallery control Table support added to the Silverlight Rich Edit control Custom dialogs in the ASP.NET HTML Editor Enhancements to the Model Editor in XAF XAF introduces a new localization tool Managing filter items in the WinForms Pivot Grid

New WPF Layout Control: Forget XAML, Let’s Go Visual

We’re happy to announce that the all-new DXLayoutControl for WPF is immediately available as part of the v2010 vol 1.6 release. You can try out this new tool right now.

With the WPF Layout Control you have full design-time support to help you create and customize a layout without having to write single line of code or modify the XAML. The flow layout control, included with this control, will also enable maximization on its child controls.

Give it a go and let us know what you think.

Announcing DXLayoutControl for WPF

DevExpress Welcomes More Talented Evangelists

Since our last issue of DX Press, we have welcomed two brand new members to the DevExpress team.

Both new recruits are equally well-qualified. One is a strong force behind community and goodwill projects within the .NET community. The other will shortly receive his PhD and become a Doctor of Machine Learning.

Join us in welcoming Steve Andrews and Seth Juarez to DevExpress.

Steve Andrews: The Power of the Community Seth Juarez: It's all about data

What Is a CodeRush Template?

Rory is going to back to basics to build up a catalogue of useful articles that explain CodeRush from A to Z. On the agenda this week we have CodeRush templates.

What are templates? How can they help me save time? How can they improve the readability of my code?

Let’s take a look and find out.

CodeRush Templates: 101

Entity Framework 4 and the WinForms Pivot Grid

Not all functions are defined in your storage provider. Some can be defined in the model.

Paul is on hand to walk you through the steps to define such a model in Entity Framework 4, and bind the results to the XtraPivotGrid.

Take a look at this solution and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Create a Model Defined Function and bind the results to pivot grid

How Can an ORM Tool Help Me?

When we’re on the move meeting developers at different events, it’s always interesting to hear what questions they have about using technology and whether DevExpress has solutions to meet the needs of their circumstances.

Here Gary identifies some of the scenarios in which developers may find themselves in need of an ORM tool, such as XPO.

Do any of these represent your team dynamic? Could you benefit from an ORM tool?

Why should I use an ORM tool?

Learn How To Use The DevExpress GridView MVC Extension

Mehul walks you through the basics of using the DevExpress MVC GridView extension.

Watch the video and you'll also learn how to setup a basic ASP.NET MVC website as well connect a MVC GridView extension to a database.

Getting Started with GridView Extension in ASP.NET MVC