Last week was a BIG WEEK for Telerik developer tools. This past Wednesday, Telerik released updates for 8 developer tools. This includes - RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, WinForms, Silverlight, WPF, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, Telerik Reporting, OpenAccess ORM, and JustCode.
Today, Sitefinity CMS is also getting an update with Service Pack 3. This Service Pack includes the updated Q1 2010 RadControls, impressive performance improvements, and the option to store Images & Documents on the file system (as opposed to the database).
Highlights
Here are a few highlights from this release (full details are listed below):
Performance Improvements for Large Web Sites
Service Pack 3 improves performance dramatically for web sites with thousands of pages. These performance improvements were applied to scenarios where a data grid is being bound to very large SiteMaps. This includes Sitefinity’s Page Admin as well as other areas of the Sitefinity Admin.
Store Images & Documents on the File System (instead of the database)
In the past, all the files stored in Sitefinity’s Images & Documents module were stored in the database. Service Pack 3 includes a new provider that allows these files to be stored directly on the file system instead of the database.
To enable file-based storage, see the How to enable the Files provider for Images and Documents module in Sitefinity 3.7 SP3 KB article.
This option is useful if your hosting provider limits the size of your database. If you aren’t constrained by database file size constraints, then this provider should not be needed.
Streaming for Large Files
“Streaming” allows Sitefinity to work with large file (particularly video) more efficiently. Instead of loading the entire file into memory, Sitefinity steams only the part of the file that is needed. This reduces the overall load on the web server.
Additional details can be found in the Handling Large Files in Sitefinity blog post series.
Latest version of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX are included with Sitefinity. These controls can be used with your own Sitefinity customizations & projects.
What’s Included in Service Pack 3
Images and Documents Module
- Added a File Provider
- Implemented streaming for the upload of large files
Pages Administration
- Improved performance with large number of pages
- Added Search option
Membership Providers
- Added ability to initialize Active Directory membership provider when there is no connection to Active Directory
- Optimizations in Users Administration interface when external membership providers are used
- Added support for multiple profile providers
RadControls
- Upgraded to the Q1 2010 release of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
- Improved RadEditor support for Google Chrome
Other
- Implemented FIPs compliance for Sitefinity licensing
- Added support for additional providers in Lists Module
- Optimized the load of Dashboard Administration page
What’s Fixed
Images and Documents Module
- Fixed problem with Image Gallery crashing under IE7
- Fixed jQuery errors in the Image Gallery Administration
Other
- Fixed bug with localization and DomainName persistence mode
- Fixed problem with external and group paging showing in navigation even though such language version of the page doesn’t exist
- Fixed problem in ContentView control pager related to generating valid HTML
- Fixed bug in the password answer verification functionality
- Updated several control templates (CategoriesList, CategoriesTreeView) to meet XHTML compliance requirements
- Fixed the URL handling of the Refresh to Continue button on the trial page
