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Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

Beta — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Q3 Release is shipping the Beta version of Telerik UI Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, the first MVC offering on the market. The suite introduces the first 4 homegrown components Grid, TabStrip, PanelBar and Menu, entirely built on top of the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC. All of them fully embrace the framework values - lightweight rendering, clean HTML, clear separation of concerns, easy testability - and at the same time provide the needed functionality for any ASP.NET MVC developer.

Read Telerik Extensions for MVC Unofficial FAQ.

We will be actively seeking feedback and depending on the interest we will be adding more components and features in the coming months. The official release is currently scheduled for Q1 next year.

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Grid
Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC provides rich and responsive UI for any data in your MVC views. Thanks to its robust Linq-based data engine the most commonly used Grid operations (sorting, paging, filtering) are swiftly pushed to the database to achieve the best performance. The component features flexible data binding supporting several modes: server, ajax, webservices or custom. See demos

Menu
The Telerik ASP.NET MVC Menu component is all you need for building lightweight, search engine-friendly menu systems. Featuring semantic rendering for min and clean HTML, jQuery based animations effects, templates. Enjoy responsiveness, and impressive looks through a rich set of professionally designed skins. See demos

TabStrip
A lightweight navigation component the TabStrip allows you to build tabbed interfaces in your ASP.NET MVC websites. Control the look and feel of your tab through its various configurations: horizontal or vertical orientation, insert images, links, etc. Featuring semantic rendering for min and clean HTML, load on demand, jQuery based animations effects and numerous slick skins for rich UIs. See demos

PanelBar
The component brings professional Outlook-style navigation capabilities to your MVC views. It allows you to build search engine-friendly collapsible side menus with jQuery-based animations effects and slick UI. The component is featuring highly efficient semantic rendering and min HTML output, flexible binding to sitemap and collection of objects, templates support. See demos

Visual Appeal
The Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC ship with 13 of professionally-designed skins that are crafted to look identical to the skins for the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. All skins are fully cross-browser compatible and tested, and all skins use optimized styling techniques, like CSS sprites and primitives, to ensure maximum performance.
Licensing
The Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC are licensed under the widely adopted GPLv2. For those that need dedicated support or need to use the Extensions in an environment where open source software is hard to get approved, Telerik provides a commercial license with support included. For more details read the licensing FAQ.

WebUI Test Studio Q3 2009 Beta

Beta — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Q3 2009 Beta of WebUI Test Studio features click & play test automation of Silverlight UI, together with custom-built translators for RadControls for Silverlight. Many new features and optimizations are also shipped with the updated version of the Studio.

Test Automation for Silverlight Applications

With Q3 2009 WebUI Test Studio provides the long-awaited by many customers Silverlight recording. Silverlight Automation functionality of the Studio has been specifically crafted to make it as simple to use but also as rich as possible. Now you can benefit from UI object model that covers the complete list of UI elements in Silverlight, and use a rich feature set with very little limitations.

Integrated translators for RadControls for Silverlight

Thanks to the integrated control translators, your team no longer needs to worry about testing applications built with Telerik Silverlight controls. QAs and Developers now have access to exposed validations allowing for specific functionalities to be tested.

Another supported browser: Safari for Windows

Users will now be able to expand their browser compatibility testing to another major browser: Safari for Windows. Record a single test, and have it executed against Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari for Windows all at once.

New Automated Overlay Surface

The Studio features complete redesign of its user interface to help users build verifications faster. The new Overlay Surface offers a modern and intuitive menu to choose from numerous verification types - mouse actions, JavaScript events, drag and drop, HTML elements verification, AJAX synchronization points, and more. New, more easy to use hover over surface was also implemented to help users visually detect the elements.

A brand new 3D view also ships with the Q3 version of WebUI Test Studio. Accessed through the verifications menu, this new feature allows users to dissect the DOM hierarchy and target a specific element using a new 3D visualizer. This feature is extremely important when building Silverlight automation in real-world applications that have complex visual trees. Furthermore, the UI allows you to build all sorts of verifications against the targeted element with just few clicks.

New slick storyboard

A revamped, slick and shiny visual storyboard has been added in the Q3 Beta version of the Studio. The screenshots of your testing actions are now ordered in a coverflow-like sequence, which allows users to easily navigate through the captured steps.

Support for XUnit & MbUnit

WebUI Test Studio expands its unit framework support to include XUnit and MbUnit in addition to NUnit and Visual Studio unit testing framework. When installing the Framework, new fully commented NUnit, MbUnit and XUnit ItemTemplates will be added to your list of available templates.

RadControls for WinForms Q3 2009 Beta

kurteva — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Telerik RadControls for WinForms Q3 2009 Beta includes improvements in the feature set of existing controls and several optimizations in performance and behavior.

Telerik Presentation Framework

The Beta preview of Telerik's Q3 release focuses on optimizations in Telerik Presentation Framework allowing for breaking improvements in performance. For the Beta release we have refactored the RadElement lifecycle which�decreases�RadControls application's load and dispose times between 20% and 300%. The new RadElement life cycle also eliminates the major disadvantages of the previous element tree's "Lazy" loading mechanism.

The HTML-like text rendering has been optimized to boost rendering performance by more than 40%, and now supports HTML tags for relative font size, lists, links, background-color, and style.

Controls Enhancements

Telerik team has also introduced fixes and performance improvements throughout the rest of the WinForms suite, namely in GridView, ComboBox, RadButtons, Dock, Form, Menu, TreeView, RibbonBar, and Scheduler.

RadMarkupEditor (new user control)
RadMarkupEditor is a WYSIWYG editor which has been added on framework level to simplify the way users and developers edit text in HTML-like markup. The editor provides an intuitive and easy to use Ribbon interface and can be used both in design-time and at runtime (runtime support will be available in the official Q3 release). RadMarkupEditor is available for all Telerik WinForms controls which support HTML-like text formatting.

RadGridView
The Beta version of RadGridView features improved scrolling in hierarchy mode so that a single scrollbar is used for the whole grid (instead of each child view having its own scrollbar).

RadComboBox / RadListBox
The new version of RadComboBox and its derivative - RadListBox - come with improved data binding through refactoring, which results in faster binding, support for large number of items, and memory footprint improvements.

RadScheduler

Drag-and-drop improvements - Q3 2009 of RadScheduler brings improved rendering feedback and better responsiveness in all drag-and-drop operations.
Resource grouping - The new version also features Resource Grouping - an enhancement our enterprise customers will surely welcome. The grouping allows you to group different resources in different views and show them on the same scheduler surface:

Read full release notes

RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2009 Beta

kurteva — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX 3 Q3 2009 Beta includes 3 brand new controls and numerous updates and performance improvements among existing controls.

Beta Controls

ListView
A brand new ASP.NET AJAX control that enable users to view and manage various data entries in a list

RadListView features include paging, sorting, and selection of items that allow you to navigate through the data or group it based on the end user's preferences.
Sorting with RadListView

Selection with RadListview
Rich Data Editing - Telerik RadListView allows you to manage various data entries based on the controls you embed within its edit/insert templates. It supports automatic data editing operations (through ASP.NET 2.x/3.x data source controls) as well as manual editing.
Predefined layouts - The template mechanism of Telerik RadListView allows you to model the look and feel of each of its elements in a completely custom manner. With RadListView, you can layout your data any way you like.
Powerful Databinding - Telerik RadListView has built-in support for all ASP.NET 2.0 datasources, as well as .NET 3.5 (LinqDataSource, WebServices, Entity Framework).
RadDataPager control to provide rich paging functionality

Sitemap
Introducing a new lightweight and flexible control that displays the list of pages on a web site organized in hierarchical fashion.

Configuration - Users can customize the control appearance by choosing various configuration options (list or flow state, number of displayed columns, vertical or horizontal view)
Semantic Rendering - RadSiteMap implements an efficient semantic rendering that uses lists for minimal HTML output and improved SEO performance.
Templates - RadSiteMap gives you full control over the node markup. You can define per-level, per-node and global templates.

Rating
Telerik RadRating is a flexible UI component that allows users to intuitively rate by selecting number of items from a predefined maximum number of items. The user can fully customize the control by configuring its orientation, rating precision, direction etc.

Horizontal/Vertical Orientation, Direction - RadRating can be displayed horizontally or vertically on the page. You can also configure its direction to suit your needs or layout (right-to-left, top-to-bottom, and vice versa)
You can choose the maximum number of items the user can rate from
Selection Modes - In Single mode a single item is marked as selected and in Continuous mode all items, starting from the first one, are marked as selected.
Rating Precision - the RadRating control enables users to select their rating value by setting the Precision property to Exact, Half, or Whole Item
Rating and Posting Comments - option to rate, leave a comment, and view the average rating of a posted article

Controls Enhancements

RadScheduler

Context menus - you will be able to add/remove/edit/categorize your appointments or time slots through a context menu
Description field - RadScheduler will now have a new "Description" field which contains more info for the appointment

RadGrid

Attachment column
Binding with RIA services
Auto-generate hierarchy

RadDock - improved and more reliable rendering for all scenarios

Common for all controls

Performance optimizations on the server
New skin - Sitefinity

Read full release notes

TFS Work Item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard

bozhkova — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

TFS Work Item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard are intuitive work item management applications that provide a dynamic platform for team workload coordination. Both tools have been used extensively internally at Telerik and Imaginet for over six months with great results.

TFS Work Item Manager
TFS Work Item Manager provides a unified platform to support those of you who want to take advantage of the Team Foundation Server. Multiple applications and steps are now simplified into a single step, and single screen processes in this tool. It helps free up more developer time to actually write code, not manage what development teams have to do.Some of the TFS Work Item Manager highlights include:

Work Item grid filtering, grouping, and aggregation
Unique Task Board view of work items independent from any process template
Print work item cards for the board in your room
Iteration schedule
Search the title and description of query results as you type

Explore TFS Work Item Manager full feature list

TFS Project Dashboard
TFS Project Dashboard visualization tool helps organizations understand the health of projects and teams. Indicators visualize build history, recent check-ins, assigned tasks and bug history, as well as improving accountability for personal tasks, workloads and release schedules. It has several templates for agile development, including Capability Maturity Model Integration process improvement, Microsoft's MSF for Agile Software Development Projects, and Scrum. The TFS Project Dashboard increases team transparency and is designed to end the question from management of "what are we doing" or "who broke the build?"

Telerik Data Services Wizard

boev — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Telerik OpenAccess ORM offers the developer a tremendous benefit by providing the data access plumbing in web and Windows applications. A best practice is to separate your data tier from your UI and business tiers and communicate via a service, such as WCF. In addition to WCF many developers are also using RESTful services such as ADO.NET Data Services or the REST capabilities build into WCF via the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2.

In order to work with these technologies, the developer has to create the service endpoints, a pretty generic but manual and time consuming task. The Telerik Data Services Wizard is a tool that will automatically create the C# code and necessary project files for using OpenAccess entities with the following services, saving the developer time and eliminating syntax errors and bugs:

Astoria (ADO .NET Data Services)
WCF
REST Collection Services (WCF REST Starter Kit)
ATOM Publishing Services (WCF REST Starter Kit)

Using the wizard is easy, after startup, the developer will choose the compiled DLL containing all of the OpenAccess entiries and then select which entities they want to expose in the service and what service they want to use (WCF, Astoria, etc.) Then the wizard will generate the code necessary, giving the developer the ability to preview or save the files and add to their project.

Download and run the Telerik Data Services Wizard today. The Telerik Data Services Wizard now works with any version of OpenAccess. In addition, the wizard will only produce C# code, not VB.net. In the future we will let you choose dynamically what version of OpenAccess you want to use, include VB.net support and make the wizard part of Visual Studio.

Enjoy

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC (CTP)

markova — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC (CTP) extend the ASP.NET MVC framework by delivering a server-based framework that integrates with client-side modules based on popular JavaScript library, jQuery. Built from the ground up on the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework, these new UI extensions facilitate development of reusable AJAX scripting components and deliver WebForms-like productivity without sacrificing the patterns, practices, and guidance of ASP.NET MVC.

This first CTP of the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC lays the foundation for the new UI extension framework and offers an opening look at a number of UI components that leverage and build upon jQueryUI, including Accordion, Slider, Tab, DatePicker, MessageBox and Progress Bar. The jQueryUI wrappers are a preview of what's possible with the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC framework, and later this year the Extensions will be enriched with new Telerik components such as Grids, Menus and more.

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC is being made available as a Community Technology Preview that you can freely download from CodePlex.

See demos

Accordion

DatePicker

ProgressBar

Slider

Message Box

Tab

Future Telerik UI Extensions will not be based on jQueryUI
These wrappers are a preview of the power and implementation of the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC framework. The wrappers are provided as-is as contributions to the ASP.NET MVC and jQuery communities. Later this year, Telerik will begin shipping new, custom-built, open source UI components based the foundation revealed in this CTP. Telerik's new UI Extensions will use the API format found in this CTP, but will more closely match the styling and features of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

Why use Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

Pure ASP.NET MVC components - Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC is built from the ground up to leverage the benefits of the ASP.NET MVC framework. The UI extensions completely embrace MVC controllers and easily integrate with them to provide rich functionality.
Completely Open Source - The Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC are licensed under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), the same license used to distribute ASP.NET MVC. The complete source for the Extensions is available on CodePlex.
Telerik Quality Support - Even though the Telerik Extensions are completely open source, a commercial license is also available for organizations that are blocked from using open source software or for those developers that want access to Telerik's industry leading support.
Based on jQuery - Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC are based on the open source and Microsoft-supported jQuery JavaScript library.
Multiple view engine support - In addition to the default view engine, you can use any other view engine that supports ASP.NET MVC, such as Spark or NHaml.
Complete control over your HTML markup - ASP.NET MVC enables a clear separation of concerns and allows developers to benefit from more control over the HTML that is emitted. The Telerik Extensions respect this and render clean HTML with clean control IDs.
Better Testability - The MVC pattern makes it easier to test applications than it is to test WebForms-based web applications. With the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, you can easily test views without running a web server or relying on complicated mocking.
Enables rich AJAX integration - Building on the lightweight AJAX patterns found in jQuery, the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC make it easy to add pure AJAX UI updates to standards-based web applications.

Telerik Oslo Comparison and Migration Tool

markova — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft Oslo platform is a new model driven development paradigm. Developers can model their applications using the new M language and store their M code on disk or move their M to the repository in order to share their models and metadata with the rest of their organization. As applications evolve, their models evolve. Developers will now have new versions of their M code.

The Telerik Oslo Comparison and Migration Tool allows developers using "May CTP" to compare two M source code files (or groups of files) and view the differences with a Visual Diff.

Once a developer sees the differences they can determine if their new code will break their existing applications and choose to merge the files or discard the changes.

Developers can also compare M in the Microsoft Oslo repository and perform the same visual diff and merge capabilities. A future version of this tool will also allow the developers to migrate one version of the repository to another.

Download the Alpha CTP today get started, all you need is two M files! For more information you can explore the release notes and getting started guide in the /docs folder.

Telerik LINQ to M

markova — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft Oslo platform is a new model driven development paradigm. Developers can model their applications using the new M language. M allows you to define a structure for your data as well as represent it in graph based values. Representing values in the M language is very similar to JSON, which will allow you to represent your data in name/value pairs. Here is an example of M values in action:
People
{
{ Id=>1, Name=>"Steve", Age=>36},
{ Id=>2, Name=>"Mike", Age=>29}
}

Developers have gotten very excited over the past few months about M languages. M Languages allows the developer to create a Domain Specific Language (DSL). You can create a DSL for the above "schema" of people that allows the developer to write in plain text:

"Create two people named Steve and Mike age 36 and 29."

Using .NET and the Oslo May CTP you can then transform (much like XSLT) the above natural language text into M values:

People
{
{ Id=>1, Name=>"Steve", Age=>36},
{ Id=>2, Name=>"Mike", Age=>29}
}

The problem is that parsing these values is sometimes difficult in .NET. What we need is LINQ to M Values. Unfortunately Microsoft has not included that in the Oslo SDK for us. Enter the Telerik LINQ to M tool.

Telerik's Mehfuz Hossain created the LINQ Extender (available on CodePlex). At the MVP summit while showing Telerik's Chief Strategy Officer Stephen Forte his implementation of the LINQ Extender for a LINQ to Flickr implementation, Mehfuz and Stephen got to work on a LINQ to M implementation.

The Telerik LINQ to M implementation allows the developer to use pure LINQ statements with blocks of M values, pure text or the results of a transformed DSL.

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Once you set a reference to the Telerik.M.Core.dll, you can execute pure typed or untyped LINQ commands and even bind to .NET controls (and Telerik RAD controls as well!)

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Download the Telerik LINQ to M implementation�and start to query your M values today. Take a look at the�sample application included for some guidance as well as come more complex LINQ statements.�

Telerik Visual Style Builder for RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX

avasilev — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Telerik Visual Style Builder is a web-based, fully functional CSS customization tool that enables easy, point-and-click customization of skins for the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. This tool eliminates the need to understand the front-end HTML and CSS structure of the RadControls to create custom skins. It gives you complete control over the elements of the RadControls' skin and allows you to create your own custom skin in minutes.

The Visual Style Builder provides two basic modes for skin customization. Through the colorization mode you can easily color shift by simply sliding through the color spectrum. All of the colorization changes not only effect the CSS colors, but also the colors of the CSS sprite images.

Through the "fine-tune" mode of the Visual Style Builder, the RadControls' skin elements can be further adjusted to fit in any web application. The graphical interface allows for edits of any skin detail - text fonts and sizes, margins and padding, background, any style property.

Currently the "fine-tune" option is available for three controls from the Telerik AJAX suite: RadGrid, RadPanelBar and RadWindow. By the Q2 2009 release (in July), all RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX will have a Fine Tune option. On top of all of this, all exported skins are completely cross-browser ready - IE7, Firefox 3, even IE6. Silverlight 2.0 is required for the colorization interface, importing skins or uploading background images.

BugTracker Demo - a Silverlight Drag & Drop and MVVM Showcase

tontcheva — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Telerik BugTracker is a sample application that demonstrates how to add the Telerik Silverlight Drag & Drop to an application and integrate it in the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. The application leverages the rich capabilities of Drag & Drop showing you how to:

provide rich visual feedback to the user by adding different icons and messages

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provide per-item drop feedback when dragging multiple items

add application-wide drag/drop rules by using Class Event Handlers�
set drag/drop properties declaratively in styles
reuse application visuals in the DragCue (via TemplateSelectors)

The application exposes a strong separation of display from state and behavior (as the MVVM pattern suggests) and each separate view is editable in Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio with full design-time. Separating the views of the application makes it much easier to create a smooth designer/developer workflow, by adding dummy data.�

Furthermore documentation is available through the free HyperAddin, which allows you to create hyperlinks in your code.�

Telerik IntelliSense for Expression Blend

tontcheva — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Stefan Dobrev, a Software Developer at Telerik, has developed a great Expression Blend add-in that finally adds IntelliSense for editing XAML files. The BlendSense add-in lets you get the same autocomplete experience regardless of whether you develop/design in Visual Studio or Blend. Stefan has reused code from Kaxaml, and adapted it to work within Blend.

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Visual Studio provides a great XAML coding environment complete with IntelliSense, but it has a designer that is far from interactive. Expression Blend, on the other hand, has a great visual designer for XAML, but won't allow you to modify the markup. Together, these tools form a pretty complete environment for development, but switching between Blend and Visual Studio might be quite annoying when developing. Thanks to the new IntelliSense add-in, this problem can be finally avoided.

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Telerik Code Converter - Convert VB to C# or C# to VB

markova — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

�Code Converter is a free and simple VB to C# and C# to VB code converter. While there are several other good code converters available, none are perfect. Some are buried in busy websites. Some are awkward to use. Some just don't convert accurately! Code Converter, while not yet perfect, aims to address these issues and provide the best free .NET converter available on the web.

See how Code Converter compares to other online code converters

Part of the mission of delivering the best code conversion service means that it needs to be available wherever and whenever you need it. For that reason, we will be building code conversion widgets for all of the major widget engines (such as Google Desktop, Windows Sidebar, and Yahoo! Widgets) so that you can easily convert your code snippet while minimizing the interruption to your work. The following code conversion widgets are already ready and available here:

Yahoo! Widgets Code Converter
Google Gadget Code Converter
Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget Code Converter

Conversions by NRefactory

For the heavy lifting, we rely on the open source NRefactory library to perform code conversions. NRefactory is a powerful C# to VB and VB to C# conversion engine maintained by the developers at SharpDevelop. By default, NRefactory requires that all code be properly wrapped in a class and (as necessary) method before converting. We try to save you time by automatically wrapping your code snippets in "dummy wrappers" so it can be processed by NRefactory. If you're having trouble converting your code, try wrapping it in a class yourself to skip our "magic" wrapping process.