Telerik.Web.UI.RadWindow cannot find embedded skin after upgrading to Sitefinity 4.4

Question

After upgrading my site to Sitefinity 4.4, I was prompted for the upgraded license file as you normally are during an upgrade, but then I got a .Net yellow screen of death stating that the

"Telerik.Web.UI.RadWindow with ID='confirmWindow' was unable to find embedded skin with name 'Sitefinity'. Please, make sure that you spelled teh skin name correctly, or if you want to use a custom skin, set EnableEmbeddedSkins=false"

(screenshot below)

I realize that Telerik moved the RadControl skins location in 4.4 from Telerik.Web.UI to Telerik.Web.UI.Skins, however I didn't expect it to break their own license confirmation page.

According to this blog post, the skins were moved to reduce the memory usage if one doesn't need the extra skins.

Does anyone know what I need to do to fix the reference and/or make Sitefinity use the reduced footprint default skins? My number 1 priority is to fix the problem. Number 2 priority would be the smaller memory usage.

Answer 1

All ASP.NET AJAX controls in Sitefinity use the so called "Sitefinity" skin which is now part of the external Telerik.Web.UI.Skins.dll. If you want to not add a reference to the Skins assembly - you should use the "Default" skin which is located in the Telerik.Web.UI.dll. In order to exclude the "Sitefinity" skin for the whole web application just add this line in the appSettings section of the web.config file:

<add key="Telerik.EnableEmbeddedSkins" value="false" />

Answer 2

To solve priority 1 - just make it work:

a. In Visual Studio, click Project > Add Reference... b. Click 'Browse', and browse to your Sitefinity project's 'bin' folder c. Select 'Telerik.Web.UI.Skins.dll', and click OK. d. Build your project

Should work fine now.

However, that doesn't answer priority 2 - smaller memory usage. Since Sitefinity uses a custom Sitefinity skin for the Admin UI, is it not possible to get the memory gains mentioned in Ivan Zhekov's blog post?