Introducing Infragistics MVP André Krämer

Hello and welcome everybody here at the Infragistics MVP blog. My name is André and I’m one of the lucky guys who’ve been nominated by Infragistics as a Most Valuable Professional. If you’re not familiar with the concept of MVP’s, make sure to read this blog post by Tony Lombardo. For those of you who don’t have the time to read all that stuff yet, the short version of the story is that I’m not an Infragistics employee, but a regular customer with a great passion for sharing knowledge.

As you may, or may not already have noticed English isn’t my native language. So you might expect a lot of spelling and grammar errors here in my post, probably some words that don’t really exist and some other unintentionally funny sentences. So if you find any of those, just take them for your entertainment and keep on reading ;-) If you aren’t a native speaker, too, this situation might come handy to you because from my experience articles written by foreigners are very easy to read by other foreigners ;-)

About Me

Having talked enough about the MVP thing and my language problems now, I thought that it would be good practice to continue my first post here with a short self introduction:

As I already mentioned my Name is André. I live with my wife and our three kids near Cologne, Germany. Currently I’m working as a Senior Application Architect and Consultant for CSC. As you probably already guessed, my primary focus is the Microsoft .NET platform. In my spare time three friends and I founded (and are running) the INETA .NET User Group in Koblenz. So if you’re from the area around Koblenz, make sure to attend our meetings. I’d be happy to meet you there and chat about one of my favourite topics, the Infragistics NetAdvantage tool suite.

Another occasion to meet me in personal would be at dotnet Cologne, Germany’s community launch event for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. I’ll be presenting on jQuery there, so if you’re going to attend the conference and are into web development, make sure to attend my talk. Within the breaks you can probably find me at the Infragistics booth, doing some NetAdvantage demos and answering questions. So again, if you’re going to be at dotnet Cologne, come over to the Infragistics booth and just say Hi to either Nils (the sales guy) or me. I’d be happy to answer your questions on any NetAdvantage product, or at least forward your questions to the right person at Infragistics (Hi Craig ;-)).

If you’re not going to be at dotnet Cologne, then the Basta conference would be a place to talk in personal. In general I join the team of Infragistics Europe during the main conference and do work at the Infragistics booth. The next Basta conference is going to be in September and I’m pretty sure, that I’ll be there that time, too.

If you don’t have a chance to attend one of our meetings or one of the conferences, but are on Twitter, click this link to follow me at twitter and get in contact with me there.

One of my other spare time projects had been writing a German book on Infragistics NetAdvantage for Windows Forms. Unfortunately due to the birth of my son, I had to stop working on the book. (Just to make sure that you don’t get the last sentence wrong: I’m sad that I had to stop writing and not that my son was born ;-)) Currently I’m looking for a way to publish the chapters I’ve written so far somewhere. As soon as I know what and how to do it, I’ll definitely let you know here or on my German .NET blog.

Finally some technical stuff!

Well, I guess that was actually enough personal stuff for now. So in return for reading so far, or at least scrolling down to this point, here’s a nice piece of JavaScript that I wrote some time ago. It combines jQuery and the Infragistics CSOM and might become handy to you if you’re using the ASP.NET Aikido WebDropDown. It allows selecting the complete content of a WebDropDown as soon as the user clicks on the underlying textbox. Like this, your users may directly start typing after clicking into a WebDropDown:

$(document).ready(function(){

    $('.igdd_ValueDisplay').click(function(){
         this.select();
      }); 
  });

Well that’s all for now. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please make sure to check this place regularly for updates. I’m pretty sure that you’ll find some solutions to real world problems here, as this blog is maintained by the Infragistics MVP’s - who are just regular customers, writing real applications and having solutions to real problems within those apps.