Sam Basu guides us through a hands-on guide on getting started with Telerik Report Server.

Reporting is an essential part of many Enterprise workflows. With today's mobile app lifestyle and cloud services, you may think data is ubiquitous for consumption. That's until the C-level executives or Sales folks in your company demand to see fancy weekly reports generated out of data, sitting either on-premises or in cloud storage. On top of stringent formatting requirements, they demand someplace to manage reports behind a safe authentication and the ability to view reports from any device. Don't bang your head against the wall. Bite the bullet and deliver what's needed. The right tools will make all the difference.

Enter Telerik Report Server—your one-stop shop for professional report management. This article unpacks Report Server for you. Let's start!

Setting Up

Report Server comes bundled up as a lightweight web application that you get to download and run on your local web server.

First, head over to the download page and grab the installer, by clicking on the big red button. Alternatively, if you already have a Telerik DevCraft subscription, Report Server can also be downloaded from your Telerik Control Panel. This may also be a good time to check ​the System Requirements before proceeding.



Once you begin installing Report Server, make note of where you unpack the bits. This is the file location where your Report Server installation will run from.



Sit back and let the installer do its thing. Notice how it is trying to configure your local IIS in the process​—you can manually change configurations later, but Report Server offers you a nice default setup.



When the install finishes, take a pe​ek into the files that come with Report Server. As you can see, they include the assets to run a web application​—you may look, but you don’t need to change anything.

Configuration

Next up, open up your local IIS Manager to see what’s been done for you (the screenshot below shows IIS 8 on my Windows 10 machine).

Report Server comes in the form of a simple web application and it has been pre-configured to run as a separate website Telerik Report Server on its own Application Pool.

Check your Site Bindings in the IIS Manager. Report Server simply runs on a open HTTP port like 80 or 83. Click on Browse:xx or point your browser to http://localhost:<port#> and Report Server comes up.

Before you rejoice however, you need to realize the first time you run Report Server is of pivotal importance. That’s because you get to set up the Admin user the first time around​—this user can later add other Admins or regular users. So, make note of the credentials as you register the Admin user.

Everyday Usage

BUILD YOUR REPOSITORY

Report Server is meant to be hosted via an on-premise web server or in the cloud. It starts out running locally in your machine’s IIS, ready for you to push to a production URL for access. Before you do so, however, it may be worth trying out a few everyday workings of the Report Server from the user’s standpoint.

In the standalone Report Designer that comes with Report Server, serialization/deserialization of the report definition is done with a specific brand of XML. Reports have a .TRDX extension. If you already have Telerik Reporting installed, you’ll find a lot of sample .TRDX reports in the corresponding Examples folder, which offer an easy way to play with Report Server. Alternatively, once you have Report Server running, just hit the New Report button from the dashboard​—this downloads the Report Designer and you can create reports from scratch.



Click the Upload link from the Dashboard menu, pick a .TRDX report and off you go.

Once Report Server has picked up your report, it shows up as a line item in its report collection. Once selected, several menu options light up.

REPORT VIEWING

Go ahead and hit the Preview link, or just double click on the report. Report Server opens up a browser window or tab, and shows you a preview of the report. The report view is complete with readability, navigation, download and print options.



Now, if you were the regular user of this Report Server solution, you would want the flexibility to open up reports from any device—including mobile ones, right? Go ahead and resize your browser window to simulate smaller devices, like tablets or smartphones. As the screen real estate shrinks, you’ll see Report Server adjusts the report layout continuously. A Hamburger menu even shows up when the screen is too small for the standard navigation. The responsive design of these reports means that you can deliver your reports to any device!

REPORT MANAGEMENT

Want to edit a report, instead of just viewing it? No problem—simply select the report and hit the Edit link on the Dashboard. The standalone Telerik Report Designer will download if you don't have it and then open up in Desktop mode. The Report Designer offers the user a rich WYSIWYG editor to customize existing reports with data binding and a variety of formatting options.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to play around with reports in Report Server—simply upload and deliver. Alternatively, with the stand-alone desktop Report Designer which is hooked up to your Report Server, users can simply add/edit reports locally and changes show up server-side automatically upon saving the reports. The user interface is simple enough for even your non-technical users to be able to store and manage reports without difficulty.

SCHEDULING

Now, having a report management system is nice, but you still get constant demands on scheduled report delivery. Your sales folks want daily trip reports or your CEO wants a weekly summary. Report Server helps you automate all such demands through robust Scheduling options.

Simply select a report and choose the Scheduling option from the top menu.

You get to set up a scheduling Task to deliver the chosen report in a variety of document formats.

You also get a wide array of choices for task recurrence for the chosen report. Keep in mind, each report is driven by its backend data source and the task runs at scheduled times. So your users get a fresh report delivered to them that pulls in the latest data.



You get full granularity to control the occurrence of the scheduling task. Flexibility FTW!



Once you set up a task, you can see it from your Reports or Schedules dashboard.



Now, who gets these scheduled reports? That’s something you get to decide through Subscribers.



Subscribers can be regular Report Server users or external folks with an email address. You get to control mail and SMTP settings from Configuration options.

Flexibility

Vanilla report storage and management can be no fun. You will be faced with the challenges of grouping reports, streamlining storage and managing users, along with fine-grained control to reports. Fortunately, Report Server offers a wide array of flexibility options.

A decision you have to make up-front is where you want Report Server to store all its reports and metadata for management. Report Server allows easy Storage Configuration to help you choose where you want your storage of reports. Your options are the local file system or Microsoft SQL Server and Redis through data connections. There is no right answer here—it all depends on your needs.

As you start dealing with lots and lots of reports, you’ll invariably want to group reports into logical buckets. This allows for better organization and controlling access to report groups by individual or by collections of users. Report Server allows you to define any number of Categories and manage new/existing reports into respective categories.



The very first user (likely yourself) that you set up in Report Server is the Super User, and beyond that you get robust User Management. Simply navigate to User Management and select an existing user to see the list of options. You get fine-grained control over user permissions towards access control on a specific report or a collection of reports through Categories.



As you set up new users of your Report Server, you can grant them specific User Roles and then control the permissions on a per report or category basis. You also can set up System Administrators, who can manage other users, or Data Administrators, who control storage configuration, along with who gets read/write access to reports.

Report Server, out of the box, supports the standard Forms Authentication. But what if your users do not like to remember one more User ID and Password? Relax. You can leverage the WS Federation standard to authenticate your users. This immediately opens up doors for Active Directory or Azure AD authentication. Simply trust the established Identity Provider to get you a token once the user is authenticated, and then proceed with regular Report Server access rights.

Here’s how you set up WS Federation authentication in Report Server. Simply head over to Configuration | Authentication and provide basic information, like WS Metadata URI, Relaying Party ID (your Report Server installation), the Authority URL that issues the token and the unique Client ID.

Once set up correctly, your users will have the option of signing in through AD credentials, on top of the regular Report Server authentication. It’s ok to rejoice.

Conclusion

Report storage and management is tricky business for most enterprises. Sure you can roll out a home-grown solution, but the enormous efforts needed to build ​high-performing, responsive and robust management features far outweigh the benefits.

Report Server comes with everything you expect right out of the box. You get to manage storage, retrieval and delivery of reports from any device the users bring to the table. And you also get the flexibility to fine-tune report categorization and storage configurations, on top of robust user management. You’ll love having Report Server on your side.

What’s in the Box?

This release is a big milestone for us, as we’ve added report scheduling to the Telerik Report Server. This is one of the most requested features and we’re very happy we could deliver it in such a short timeframe. We also added capabilities to the report storage and management along with user management, which lets you use active directory credentials to log in. All together this makes access to the reports far more seamless and secure for those that need them, whether in your company or for your clients. Don’t forget we’ve built this with a responsive web design, so you can load and manage reports from any device. Find out more on what’s new here.

Report Scheduling

Yes, it’s true; you can now schedule reports to run automatically. You can even add an unlimited number of recipients to each scheduled task, and they’ll receive the report right in their mailbox.

Setting a scheduled task is very easy, and once set you have a few options to track it. You can create a task while in the reports view for a selected report, or go to the scheduling module and start from there.

For a new task, you need to specify:

• The report that will run
• The format it’ll be saved in: PDF, Excel, Word, TIFF, RTF, CSV, PowerPoint, Web Archive, XPS
• The date the task will run
• The recurrence, defined by setting the repeat period to daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or once (and when the task recurrence should end)

You can monitor a task you’ve created in its activity panel. There you’ll see when the task runs, along with the documents created as a result and when they were created. The generated report documents are saved in the Report Server storage that you choose when you configure it.

If you want the generated report to be automatically distributed to stakeholders, colleagues or clients, you can add as many recipients as you want to the scheduled task subscribers list. They can be both Report Server registered users and external one-time entries.

For the automatic emails to be sent to the report recipients, you need to make a one-time configuration in the Report Server settings to specify your mail server properties. You can find more information in the documentation.

AD FS Support

We know that most companies prefer their employees to use their domain credentials to log into any application used internally by the company. It’s more secure, easier to manage by IT and simpler for the end user as they won’t need to create and remember separate accounts for each app. With this release, Telerik Report Server provides that option. In addition to the local (WebForms) account support, we provide authentication option through the Web Services Federation (WS-Federation) specification. Now you can easily configure the Report Server to use a Federation provider to log in. Currently we support:

• Active Directory for Windows Domain
• Azure AD

Find out more on how to set it up here.

What’s Next?

More and more exciting staff is coming. First, we will enhance the scheduling functionality by adding the ability to set report parameters for the scheduled task through a nice UI that’s easy to use. This will allow you to best leverage the report parameters functionality and reuse the same report definition multiple times. We will also add the ability to customize the email template that’s sent to the scheduled task subscribers with the generated report. When we’re ready with these features, we will release them immediately.

A full roadmap will be available on the Report Server page by the end of the month, so stay tuned. To have a say on it, share your feedback and thoughts in our feedback portal or in the comments below.

P.S. Join Telerik developer advocates on October 14th to see technical demos of the DevCraft Q3 2015 release highlights. You’ll have a chance to win awesome prizes and get your questions answered live. Hope to see you there.

The landscape for .NET developers is fast changing and now more than ever, you need the best possible tools to get your job done. Just in time comes the Telerik DevCraft Q3 2015 Release—packed with goodies to enable you to build the next generation of amazing applications for desktop, web and mobile.

Fall/Autumn is a time to get out and enjoy nature, not be holed up in your cubicle. Here’s to Telerik DevCraft helping you deliver projects on time and above expectations. Q3 was a big release and you know the right tools make all the difference.

Relive the Content

On Oct 14th, Telerik developer advocates Michael Crump, Sam Basu& Ed Charbeneau unpacked the Telerik DevCraft bits during the Q3 Release Webinar. For our worldwide audience, we tried covering the content in two time slots this time​—and it looks like it paid dividends for most audiences in conflicting time zones. If you could not make it, you can relive the webinar in its entirety—we now have high definition recording available!

Prize Winners

What’s a Telerik webinar without some awesome prizes? In tune with what’s hot in the Microsoft devices space, we had picked Surface Pro 3 and Xbox One—developers need to be productive everywhere and have fun as well, right? We picked four random winners among webinar attendees for each of the two time slots. You win just for showing up!

11 AM EST Timeslot Winners:
Xbox One​—Dave Scholl
Surface Pro 3—Mark Aydelotte

6 PM EST Timeslot Winners:
Xbox One—Eric Zhuang
Surface Pro 3—Tom Franklin

Congrats winners. Hope you enjoy your prizes!

Additional Questions/Answers

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the webinars for us advocates is the Q/A at the end. We appreciate developers looking at our latest tooling and coming up with real-world questions on usage or product features. While we try to answer as many questions as we can on air, there are just way too many to cover​—here are some additional questions and answers on the most appropriate queries and expanding on product roadmaps.

Mobile:

Q: Do you have any examples of real-world apps for native controls?
A: Yes, you can check out our Windows Phone App Showcase and our customer apps in the spotlight for iOS and Android.

Q: When will UWP UI Controls be available in the Telerik Control Panel?
A: Right now, the new UI for UWP suite is in CTP. As the product becomes official, we will add it to your Telerik Control Panel for easy downloading.

Q: Are you working on a Grid in UI for UWP?
A: If you check the Windows 10 UWP Controls roadmap, you will see that the Grid is our top priority for Windows 10. Other highly prioritized controls are the Image Editor and the design templates from UI for Windows Phone.

Q: Is there sample code for UI for Xamarin?
A: Yes, it is included when you download the UI for Xamarin control suite.

Desktop:

Q: How do I implement themes like you did for the RadTimeSpanPicker?
A: We have 15 themes that are currently available. You can learn how to use a theme HERE. Have fun.

Q: What is the main use of Icon Set for WPF?
A: To provide icons for your app so that you won't need to buy them elsewhere or hire a designer.

Q: Please elaborate on Desktop Alerts for WPF.
A: It allows you to display notifications on the desktop if a specific event occurs in your application. For example, a new e-mail message, meeting request or task request. It is displayed as a small pop-up on a predetermined location for a short period of time and will disappear shortly thereafter. Please look HERE for more info.

Q: Tell me more about the Medical Sample App for WinForms.
A: The Medical App demo shows how to integrate several Telerik components to build a real world scenario of a doctor-patient management system, allowing doctors to manage their patient records, visits and appointments. You can find it in the integration example in our WinForms demo application.

Q: Do the Telerik UWP controls play nicely with most of the open source MVVM frameworks (like MVVM Light) out there?
A: Yes. Just like UI for Windows Phone and UI for Windows Universal, UI for UWP uses standard XAML property bindings and commands, which makes it easy to use with an MVVM architecture.

Web:

Q: Is it possible to use Spreadsheet control on a server without Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel DLL?
A: The new Spreadsheet widget in both UI for ASP.NET MVC and UI for ASP.NET Ajax are stand-alone UI components. They render HTML5-based spreadsheets in-browser and do not depend on any 3^rd party or Office components.

Q: What kind of apps can be developed using the Kendo UI framework?
A:Kendo UI is Telerik’s front-end HTML5, JS & CSS framework that aids in building modern web and mobile applications. Web applications built with Kendo UI can be for desktop or optimized for mobile. Kendo UI Mobile UI widgets can also be used to build Hybrid mobile apps for App store presence and full mobile device integration through Cordova plugins.

Q: Does the Web Components support in rendering Kendo UI widgets not work in IE/Edge?
A: Kendo UI embraces modern web technologies like Web Components and Angular 2. Keep in mind, however, that lot of these technologies have emerging specifications and not production-ready yet. As such support for upcoming specifications (like Custom elements, Shadow DOM etc. in Web Components) varies across browsers. Kendo UI simply wants to provide you with the most flexibility and acceptance of newer technologies should you wish to dabble.

Q: Can you explain the real benefit of MVC Scaffolding?
A: Kendo UI MVC Scaffolders for MVC Grid, Scheduler or Charts can be the developer’s best friends. The scaffolding solutions are meant to easily string together your Model, View and Controllers in an MVC application. Given a Model and Data Context, the scaffolding tools generate a lot of the plumbing code needed for seamless CRUD operations. This is code you would otherwise have to write by hand; the scaffolding tools simply give you a head start in the right direction.

Report Server:

Report Server has come a long way since introduction—consider it your one-stop shop for robust Report Management. This quarter, Report Server gained valuable features like Report Scheduling and WS Federation (AD FS) Authentication support.

The excitement for Report Server is palpable and we had a lot of questions from you all. To do it justice, the Report Server product team will take all the questions and make a separate blog post out of it. This will also answer your relevant doubts and spotlight some upcoming features coming up in the roadmap. Look out for it on the Report Server blog.

Resources

Webinar Recording - https://youtu.be/84iJN9EUDbs
Michael’s Deck - https://speakerdeck.com/mbcrump/devtools-q3-2015-webinar
Sam’s Deck - http://1drv.ms/1MXaubp
Ed’s Deck - http://1drv.ms/1Z7sgzg

That’s a Wrap

Spreadsheet

The official release of the Excel-like component will offer the following ​important features:

• Add/Remove Columns and Rows
• Cell Formatting features like the following: Cut, Copy and Paste, Apply Border, Alignment, Text Wrapping, Increase and Decrease Decimal, Custom Formats
• Sorting and Filtering
• Data Validation
• Import/Export—CSV, JSON, Tab delimited text
• Conditional Formatting
• Scrolling and Pinned Headers/Columns
• Context Menu
• And more

Figure 1: RadSpreadSheet—the screenshot represents the features available only in the Beta.

Material Design Skin

The ASP.NET AJAX controls will get a new modern dress inspired by the popular Material Design of Google. The Material theme will feature depth effects such as lighting and shadows which will make your apps more vivid and interactive. You will be able to change the default theme colors through the Theme Builder app.
 

Figure 2: Light Green version of the Material Design Theme.

Theme Builder Improvements

The theme creator tool will ​continue to be improved with the addition of the remaining Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls and some of the most popular themes like Silk, Glow, Metro and MetroTouch. Our long-term plans include adding new themes, like one similar to the default Kendo UI theme, that will be available for download from the app.

We will also research the possibility of providing wider support for conversion of Twitter Bootstrap themes, so that the developers can use the AJAX controls along with the Bootstrap widgets on the same page with the same look and feel.
 

 Figure ​3: Theme Builder app.

Accessibility Improvements

With the introduction of WAI-ARIA compatibility for RadAutoCompleteBox, RadButton, RadWindow, RadAlert, RadConfirm and RadPrompt, you will be able to build more accessible and usable web projects, especially for people who rely on screen readers and who cannot use a mouse.

Easy-to-Use Separate Button Components

• Easier configuration​—there will be a server tag for each button type (PushButton, ImageButton, LinkButton, etc..) and fewer properties to achieve the same level of functionality as with RadButton
• Performance optimization
• Infrastructure for new button types for Q2 2016: button list, switch button, split button and more
• We won't remove the parent RadButton and your updated apps will continue to function properly as before

Label Control

You will be able replace the standard ASP.NET Label within your web projects with a label control with the same look and feel as the rest of the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls. It will offer seamless integration with all components in the suite, along with rich feature server and client-side API for creating various captions for form editors. Its flexibility will allow you to specify the layout and positioning, as well as to customize its inner contents by adding icons and/or hyperlinks.

Chart Pan and Zoom

The long anticipated pan and zoom feature will help you and your end-users navigate through and zoom into or out of the RadHtmlChart.
 

Figure ​4: Use SHIFT + Mouse Drag Region Selection combination on mouse-enabled devices to zoom in data for a specific period of time

Responsive Toolbar

The responsive capabilities of the toolbar will allow you and your end-users to operate with its UI elements on small screen sizes like tablets or even smartphones. If there is not enough space the right placed tools will become part of the dropdown button context menu, as shown in the second screenshot.

Modern Rendering

The CloudUpload, DataForm, Gantt, MediaPlayer, ImageGallery, LightBox, ProgressBar, SiteMap, Spell, TagCloud and Wizard control will obtain light-weight and semantic rendering based on the latest trends in HTML5, CSS3 and font-icons, which will improve not only the appearance of your apps, but also their performance.

Data Forms are found in just about every LOB application–can’t we make it easier?

Creating Line-of-Business (LOB) applications can become tedious, especially if you’re designing a data entry screen. ​Typically, you gather data from your users with a TextBlock, TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton and for so forth. You begin by dragging those onto your designer, name the controls and position them where they look nice on the screen. Any additional data validation will need to come from code. If you left out a field, it's back to the designer, as you have to reposition your UI elements. I’m pleased to announce that your life just got a lot easier with DataForm in UI for Windows Universal.

A Common Data Form Layout

Before we take a look at how we implement our DataForm control, let’s look at how we do it currently.

The MainPage.xaml for a typical data form may look like the following:

Which results in the following screen: 

Each input field is given a name and some properties have been set. So far, we have seen a lot of XAML and are using a simple StackPanel to display the data properly.

What if you could define your UI through a class and have it generate your UI automatically? That's where the new DataForm comes into play.

Using DataForm Included in UI for Universal

After you have installed the Windows Software Development Kit (UWP), you will see the following templates: 

Begin by using the Blank App (Universal Windows) template and adding references to the following files:

• Telerik.Core.dll
• Telerik.Data.dll
• Telerik.UI.Xaml.Input.dll
• Telerik.UI.Xaml.Primitives.dll
• Telerik.UI.Xaml.Controls.Data.dll

We are going to use the DataForm to automatically generate our UI in our app, so let’s begin by adding a class to this project to collect contact details. As you can see from the screenshot, the contact details on the first page ​include E-mail, First Name, Last Name, Title, Company and Phone Number. You can name the class Contact, and we will add the other fields later. The code contained in this file looks like this:

A Look at Our MainPage.xaml

Our UI is simply going to reference the DataForm control. Let’s go ahead and add the proper XML namespace as shown below:

Add the following code snippet to the Grid already located on the MainPage.xaml. 

Switching Back to Our MainPage.xaml.cs File

We will need to add in the following code to set the Item property of the DataForm displayed on the screen:

Once complete, we see this:

As you can see, it automatically generated our UI based off the class that we instantiated. But, you may want to edit the field names as right now the “FirstName” needs a space between it (along with the other fields), or maybe you want to rearrange your UI to put the Company name after your last name. This is easily accomplished by adding the following property attribute to the class as shown below: 

With this small change, we now have Labels with the correct spacing, and by using the Index property attribute, we changed our UI without going back inside our XAML file. We can finish this app up by adding a button and accessing the data the user entered with the click event handler. 

Wrap-Up

Now our DataForm is starting to become alive! You could submit the data to a webserver, perform validation and so forth. I hope this helped; if you would like early access to a preview build of our Windows 10 controls, email universalwindows@telerik.com. Until next time, happy coding!

Wait, what? Is it time again for yet another feature-packed Telerik DevCraft Release? Why, yes it is! The DevCraft Q3 2015 Release is here. The official bits drop on September 30^, and we’ve got plenty of great stuff in store to show you.

The Telerik DevCraft Q3 Release Webinar, October 14, 2015

Join Developer Advocates Michael Crump, Ed Charbeneau and Sam Basu on October 14, 2015 for the DevCraft Q3 2015 release webinar. We’ll take a detailed look at what is included in this release, as well as how it fits into your next application–whether​ for web, desktop or mobile! We are also offering two time slots ​to choose from–we love developers, wherever you are in this big wide world:

• 11:00 a.m. ET (Registration Link)
• 3:00 p.m. PT (Registration Link)
  • Moderated by John Bristowe

What’s New and How Will It Help Me Deliver My App On Time?

Starting with the web, we have a brand new SpreadSheet control for Kendo UI framework, Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC and Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX that brings data management in your business applications to the next level with core Excel-like functionality. We’ve included an enhanced Visual Studio Experience (using templates/in existing projects) with Scaffolding capabilities for Grid, Chart and Scheduler widgets in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC, making it a breeze to create data-bound applications with full CRUD functionality. We’ll also deliver a preview version of AngularJS 2.0 integration for Kendo UI framework, as well as beta support for Web Components. ​Also included are enhancements to our Chart and Gantt controls, as well as an extended Nova Theme delivered in Q2 for Web and DataViz.

For the desktop, we’ve added a brand new TimeSpanPicker component for WPF, ​and enhanced our DataLayoutControl for WinForms. Also, the DesktopAlert control for WPF is now official! 

You didn’t think we’d stop there, did you? We have lots of mobile improvements, and we are excited to announce the community preview version of the vastly anticipated Telerik UI for Universal Windows Platform suite. This will enable developers to build Windows applications with the new UWP runtime that reaches any device running Windows 10! The DataForm control for UI for iOS/Android is now official and includes support for Xamarin.Forms. The DataForm component enables you to create your UI with classes instead of markup. Here is a blog post on it. We’ve also added two new controls for Telerik UI for iOS: Gauge and AutoCompleteBox.

With Q2, we officially released the Report Server, and in Q3 we are adding ​the ability to schedule automated report tasks and leverage easy user authentication with Active Directory Integration. Consider all your report generation, management and deployment issues solved!

As you can tell, this is a packed release, and we are excited to unpack the DevCraft bits for you!

Prizes

We have several great prizes lined up to be given away in both webinars. All you have to do is stay until the very end for your chance to win.

Here are the prizes up for grabs:

1. Microsoft Xbox One
2. Surface Pro 3

Limited only by official Telerik sweepstakes rules. (U.S. Only)

What Are You Waiting For? Register Now!

With enhancements across the board, from web to desktop to mobile to report server, you can see that our teams have been busy at work. We’d love for you to join us and get a chance to win two of the hottest gadgets around. How cool would it be to use your Surface 3 and the new Telerik UI for Windows Universal Platform controls to build a Windows app that runs everywhere, including your new Xbox One!

Thanks so much for reading, and feel free to register now before it is too late!

The Process of Defining a Roadmap

As much as shaping a roadmap may seem quite a trivial task at first sight, it is actually the final outcome of thorough internal discussions between our Engineering, Product Management and Product Strategy leads. It also requires the identification and prioritization of key customer stories ​for which we would like to provide solutions in the next development cycle. The important factors taken into account during this process are as follows:

• Industry research and analysis
• Direct customer surveys and feedback (including our UserVoice portal) 
• Forum posts and support requests
• Input from Telerik leadership

As visible from the bullets above, your feedback strongly influences the decision making process. It​'s a big part of what guides ​our development plans for providing web and mobile solutions with Kendo UI ​for you​ as a developer. When this data is carefully analyzed, correlated and mapped to key deliverables, the roadmap clicks in and is published on our site.

Given this insight, here are the main deliverables which we plan to pack into our Q1 2016 installment. 

Spreadsheet Goes Official

More Kendo UI App Templates and Visual Studio Project Templates

Angular 2.0 and Web Components Integrations

Northwind Dashboard App - AngularJS version

(with downloadable source code) right in our online demos.



I'll also give you a hint​—you can even review the sample app implementation ​right now. It's freely accessible in our github repository here.
​

Grid Features

Extended Widget ​Functionality

• Option to disable calendar/date pickers dates (#2 voted item on our UV portal)
• Support for a child member being a root with multiple axis dimensions for the PivotGrid

Documentation Improvements

ASP.NET MVC Server Wrappers

ASP.NET vNext Support

New Visual Studio Dashboard Project Template

Beyond Q1 2016

Your Thoughts?

Knowing what's coming in the first major release of Kendo UI in 2016 and onward, I can't wait to hear what you think about our plans. Be the first to share ​your opinion in the comments. Also ​keep in mind that we operate in a dynamic environment, and our preliminary plans might undergo some changes going forward.

If you don’t know the word “cohort,” this is what the dictionary says:

cohort

noun

1. An ancient Roman military unit, comprising six centuries, equal to one tenth of a legion
2. A group of people with a shared characteristic

Even though it could have been interesting to start mimicking military organizational elements from the Roman empire, the User Retention Cohorts that we recently introduced in Telerik Analytics are more related to definition (2) above. Although the report type does have the power of a small military unit…

Before We Dive In...

It can all sound a bit complicated, and to some extent it is, but if we keep track of the intention with user retention cohorts, then it gets easier to grasp. Basically we wish to present data that will help you understand how loyal your users are. What type are they? Do they use your app once and never again? Do they use it multiple times every day and seemingly without any end? Where are they on this scale?

What is a Telerik Analytics User Cohort?

When we speak about users in Telerik Analytics we actually mean unique installations of a given software application running on a set of devices. This could, for example, be a given hybrid app running on a number of different mobile phones. Each running app instance would be what we call a user.

A user cohort is a subset of all users that you are monitoring with Telerik Analytics for your application. In other words if we look at all the users of one of your apps, then a user cohort is simply a subset of these users.

In this first release of User Retention Cohorts the shared characteristic for the cohorts is simply the time the application is started the first time. You could say, when the “user is born.” We have chosen to implement three different cohort types: day, week and month. These correspond to the timespans that will determine whether a given user is in one cohort or the other. We basically group users by the day they were born, or the week or the month. A cohort could be all users born on Aug 12th 2015, or all users born in January 2012.

Let’s look at an example. Below we have a number of users listed with the time of the first execution of a given app.

The names of the individual cohorts (D1, W1, M1 etc.) are not relevant. They could be anything, but they show for each specific user (A to G) which cohorts the given user belongs to.

Each user is born once and thus belongs exactly to one day, one week and one month cohort. This never changes, like your birthday, birth-week and birth-month never change.

In the table above, you can see that users A, B and C all belong to week cohort W1. User A and B belong to day cohort D1, and C belongs to day cohort D2. So they are all “born” in the same week and A and B are born on the same day.

For the three cohort types we have decided that:

• New day cohorts start every day at midnight UTC
• New week cohorts start on Mondays at midnight UTC between Sunday and Monday
• New month cohorts start on the 1st of the month at midnight UTC between the last day of a month and the first of the following month

What Happens to User Engagement Over Time?

With this definition of cohorts we can talk precisely about subsets of users and start asking questions like: for the specific user month cohort that holds users born in April 2015, how many of these specific users used our application in May 2015, in June 2015 and all the way to, say, August 2015? In other words how many of the users in the given cohort were still “alive” in the following months?

This information is very important because it shows you how long an attention period you have from your users and how quickly or slowly they lose interest in your application. If you see a huge loss of users within a very short time, then clearly you have a challenge to improve your offering.

With the User Retention Cohorts you can choose to view day, week or month cohorts depending on the type of business you drive.

Why Compare Cohorts?

User engagement can be affected in many ways. Obviously the particular version of your application is an important aspect, but marketing campaigns, user reviews and even the particular time of the year or maybe even the time of the month or week can have an effect.

This is why we have made it very easy for you to compare cohorts and see how they “perform” over time. With this view you can gauge whether the steps you take to improve your business work or not.

What’s Cooking?

These cohorts are one reason among a growing list to use Telerik Analytics, and we plan to improve the User Retention Cohort reports over time. We believe it can be relevant to define cohorts based on more shared characteristics. It could be the country the user lives in. It could be those users that have executed a specific feature in your app. It could be users that, on the other hand, haven’t performed a specific action. With such further analysis you would be able to understand segments of your users better and thus be able to take the best next step to improve their experience with your app.

You can read more here:

• http://cohortanalysis.com/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohort_analysis

ASP.NET 5 is around the corner. Yes, it is a major re-write and has lots of changes. But that does not mean web developers on Microsoft stack need to be worried. In fact, it's one of the best times to be an ASP.NET developer. ASP.NET 5 is now a modern lean, modular and cross-platform web development framework that works with your choice of OS and IDE/Editors. Good times ahead!

Relive the Content

On Oct 28, Telerik developer advocates Sam Basu, Ed Charbeneau and Michael Crump unpacked all things new and shiny in ASP.NET 5 during the Telerik ASP.NET Webinar. We had a huge audience who asked a LOT of questions​—understandable given how big an impact ASP.NET has on developers. If you couldn't make it for the live webinar, you can relive the webinar in its entirety—high definition recording available now!

Prize Winners

What’s a Telerik webinar without some awesome prizes? ​As they're some of the hottest gadgets around, we picked an Xbox One and a GoPro Camera—developers gotta have fun, right?

We picked two random winners (tentative until accepted) among webinar attendees—you win just for showing up!

Xbox One​—Frank Morales
GoPro Camera—Laura Ye

Congrats winners. Hope you enjoy your prizes!

Additional Question/Answers

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the webinars for us advocates is the Q/A at the end. We appreciate developers bringing up real-world questions and concerns on the latest technologies. And ASP.NET 5 is just a hot topic that invites a ton of questions.

While we tried to answer as many questions as we could on air, there were just way too many to cover. Here is some additional Q/A, expanding on what we covered about ASP.NET as well as the Telerik ASP.NET UI suites.

Q: How do you set up the Telerik private NuGet feed?
A: There is actually nothing to set up. Telerik is already hosting the NuGet bits to include UI for ASP.NET MVC controls into your applications. In Visual Studio, go to Options and NuGet Package Manager and simply add https://nuget.telerik.com/nuget as a Package Source. This will prompt you for your Telerik account credentials first time and once authenticated, gives you access the Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC bits.

Q: What did you do to set up C# intellisense inside of Sublime Text when building ASP.NET applications?
A: Simply get the Kulture and OmniSharp packages for Sublime Text. Details @ http://www.omnisharp.net/.

Q: Can a Visual Studio ASP.NET project created on Windows be moved to OSX and run using the same setup process?
A: Although the scaffolded project structure of an ASP.NET 5 project on Windows is similar to what you’ll get in OSX/Linux, the runtimes are very different. The DNX runtime is hosted by either IIS or Kestrel for cross-platform compatibility and as such, an ASP.NET application needs to be built on the platform on which they are intended to run. There are detailed steps to set up ASP.NET on OSX and Linux, and project configuration continues to be very similar between systems.

Q: Are there easy migration paths for existing ASP.NET applications to MVC 6?
A: MVC 6 is a big re-write and migration paths will not be simple, in part, because of changed runtimes and API canvas availability. Please hold tight until ASP.NET 5 is released for the migration story to take shape. There will be guidance from Microsoft and the developer community.

Q: Is it possible to replace Bower with NuGet to manage front-end packages?
A: If the desired front-end packages exist in NuGet, by all means, you can use them instead of Bower. NuGet still plays a huge, in fact, a larger role in ASP.NET 5. Bower just gives developers additional options they didn't have before through Visual Studio alone.

Q: Can we define our own Tag Helpers in MVC 6?
A: Yes, creating your own Tag Helpers is easier than writing custom HtmlHelpers from the past.

Q: Now that configuration is done in .JSON rather than .XML, how do we add comments to our configurations?
A: At this time, there does not appear to be a way to add comments within the actual .JSON file itself.

Q: Would the config.json files allow different connection strings for various development/production environments?
A: Yes, you would use config.development.json and config.production.json to allow for different connection strings.

Q: Can you swap out the IOC container in MVC 6 with something like Autofac?
A: Absolutely, we covered this in detail on the Telerik Developer Network.

Q: Will Visual Studio automatically convert Web.config to the new Project.json on solution upgrade?
A: Keep in mind, these files serve slightly different purposes, and as such, we do not know of an automatic conversion strategy. So, there may be some manual mapping to move over configurations and dependencies​—look for the migration strategy to take shape as ASP.NET 5 is released next year.

Q: What would be the status of the Telerik UI suites moving into ASP.NET 5?
A: We’re very excited about ASP.NET 5 and your beloved Telerik UI suites will be ready when vNext of ASP.NET finally ships. In fact, we’re as ready as it can get right now. Both Telerik UI for ASP.NET Ajax and UI for ASP.NET MVC have existing support for Visual Studio 2015. The WebForms suite will be fully supported on top of .NET Framework 4.6. The MVC suite is already boasting support for ASP.NET 5 Beta 7 of MVC 6. We’re working closely with Microsoft on the cross-platform story and to utilize framework enhancements to offer the best possible ASP.NET tooling for developers.

Resources

Webinar Recording - https://youtu.be/EnfyJKSZvMU
Sam’s Deck - http://1drv.ms/1hQArOp
Ed’s Deck - http://1drv.ms/1KL49LS

That’s a Wrap

Easier Deployment with Telerik UI for WinForms

Before getting into what’s new in this release, let me share some hot news concerning our deployment procedures. Recently we loosened up our deployment requirements for the most commonly used deployment scenarios—commercial applications built with our controls. This ​will make your li​fe easier ​and ​cut out a lot of extra work. If you're building such an application, you can simply set the Copy Local property of most (in fact all but one) of our assemblies and deploy them to your users. Note that some exceptions apply and you should always consult with the following article for the latest deployment requirements: Redistributing Telerik UI for WinForms. Of course, our support engineers will also be able to assist you if you have any questions.

Q3 2015 SP1

As usual, not much longer after an official release, we​'re delivering our service pack. We've continued investing resources on improving our most used control—RadGridView. In this release alone, we’ve made over 120 improvements in the suite, 70 of which are in grid control itself.

Of course, with every service pack we also like to introduce a few new things and this one is no different. Here are some of the highlights:

• RadDiagram
  • Export to image functionality
    
• RadGridView
  • Features the long awaited full CRUD support for all hierarchy levels in object-relational hierarchy mode
  • Full Cut row support, allowing for cutting a row and pasting its values in another row
  • API for bringing row into view when paging is used
• RadPdfView
  • Features the highly demanded fit to page and fit to width page modes.
    
  • API for handling exceptions
  • API for fine grain control over its scroll bars
  • Performance improvements when navigating between pages

The release is already available in your Telerik account. If you don’t have one, you can also download a trial here.

As always, your comments are most welcome. You can also use our feedback portal to review and vote for current ideas or share new ones.

Hot on the heels of our ​last release, ​the next update to UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight is coming soon. ​We've packed it yet again with some cool and highly requested new features. Let me walk you through the most anticipated new features in the Q1 2016 official release.

New Controls

The control which helps you to pick timespan values in your desktop applications​—RadTimeSpanPicker for WPF—will be shipped in its official version with Q1 2016.

New Theme

Our new Green theme was inspired by the desire of our clients for a new flat theme. We have integrated corner radius to the theme, which can be adjusted as desired by the user, and adds a nice smooth feel to our controls. The theme comes in two variations—Dark and Light, with a green accent to it.

New Features in Existing Controls

We are working on introducing a very exciting new functionality in our Touch Manager. We are going to expose a public API which will enable you to introduce custom touch gestures in your WPF application.

The Text Search functionality in RadGridView will enable string matching over the provided data source. An interface will be available for filtering the matching rows and highlighting the exact occurrences. Complex search conditions and string exclusion will be supported.

One of the most requested features for RadRichTextBox—adding the ability to repeat the table header row on every page—is currently in development. We'll introduce a property determining whether the header rows of a table are to be repeated on every page. This ​will be very convenient for documents with large tables spanning multiple pages.

Multiple Selection in RadTileList will support selecting multiple tiles simultaneously, operating with the whole set at once.

One of the main use cases for using spreadsheets in your application is the ability to export large datasets to XLSX. We are working on a new API which will allow the generation of XLSX documents with minimal memory consumption and excellent performance (think of a document with a million cells exported ​in just a few seconds!). This is achieved by skipping the somewhat complex and almighty model of RadSpreadProcessing. The cells are created, formatted, written to the XLSX file stream and disposed consecutively one by one, which significantly reduces the memory consumption.

The Start and End of the TimeRuler in TimeLine view in RadScheduleView can be applied to each day.

We Value Your Opinion

As a customer-oriented company, your feedback plays a key role in planning the development direction of our controls and features. Please, do not hesitate to share any thoughts, opinions and ideas in the Feedback Portal, where they can be liked and prioritized by the community.

We've been working on a lightweight code generation tool for Telerik Data Access. Here is a sneak peek at what's ahead.

We're happy to share that the tool for code generation of Data Access fluent models is already in development. As promised in our communication with you, we are working on a lightweight Fluent Model generator. It will be capable of:

• Generating new fluent models based on the schemata of your databases
• Updating existing fluent models with the changes in the respective databases

You will be able to easily integrate the Fluent Model generator in your applications, as we plan to package it in a new Telerik Data Access NuGet package. Furthermore, you will be able to bend the tool any way you please, because it will be an open-source project in GitHub.

At its core, the tool is a PowerShell script capable of reading the schema of your database and generating the appropriate persistent classes, a metadatasource and a context class. Although it sounds simple, the choice of PowerShell is not an arbitrary one. This approach permanently breaks the coupling between the Data Access code generation capabilities and Visual Studio.

As a result, you have code generation with Visual Studio 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, and whatever comes next without the complications related to the T4 templates. An additional benefit that comes with PowerShell is the ability to execute the script directly from NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio.

To serve its purpose, the Fluent Model generator will consume a predefined set of text files that serve as code generation templates. As you will see for yourself, these files make the whole code generation process much more comprehensive and customizable.

The code output by default, however, won’t be much different from what you already recognize as a Data Access fluent model. The Fluent Model generator will produce persistent classes, a metadatasource and a context class. The noticeable change in it is that the mapping configuration is backend independent. This means that out-of-the-box, you will get a model that can be targeted at Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle without any adjustments.

Though the tool is not yet available, we are committed to releasing a Beta version in November 2015. So keep an eye out, as it's coming soon.

Please let us know how this sounds to you​—we can't wait to hear your feedback.

We're excited to announce that you can now update your apps to the latest Q3 2015 SP1 (ver. 2015.3.1111) release for UI for ASP.NET AJAX. There are lots of great improvements here which we're ​happy to share. You can download the new release either from your Telerik.com account or via the Telerik Control Panel, and you can check out the release notes here.

What are the Benefits for You

• Stability—the main purpose of the service pack is to reduce the count of the known bugs and to make the ​suite stable.
• Accessibility Improvements—WAI-ARIA support for RadAutoCompleteBox plus bug fixing in existing controls.
• Private NuGet Server and Feed—This useful ​option ha​d been introduced first for UI for ASP.NET MVC, as explained in the Q3 2015 release blog post of Kendo UI. Now it's also available for UI for ASP.NET AJAX. This allows you to reference, download and extract UI for ASP.NET ​AJAX via its NuGet package directly from your Visual Studio, without having to ​log into your Telerik account.
  
  To ​be able to download and install the Telerik AJAX NuGet ​package from your Visual Studio, go to Tools -> NuGet Package Manager -> Package Manager Settings -> Package Sources and press the ​"+" button. Then create a new Telerik NuGet Package source with the following URL: https://nuget.telerik.com/nuget.



Figure 1: Visual Studio NuGet Package Manager and Telerik NuGet Feed

​Click OK to close the dialog. The next step is to load/create a new Web Forms project. This will allow you to ​open the config manager shown in Figure 2 from Tools -> NuGet Package Manager -> "Manages NuGet Packages for solution." Then you can select the UI for ASP.NET AJAX NuGet Package and install it.



Figure 2: "Manages NuGet Packages for solution" manager

Live Demos

Upgrade Instruction

Roadmap Plan

With our Q3 2015 SP1 release of UI for WPF, we introduced brand new Visual Studio wizards to help you create and configure your applications. Now, when you create a new WPF project, you will be conveniently prompted with template options to choose from:

Skipping all the hassle, you can now start right away with one of our Visual Studio templates. Currently you can choose from Outlook Inspired, Excel Inspired, Word Inspired, Mail, Calendar or a Blank template. With these templates we aim to cover the most popular UIs our customers build and those commonly recognized in the industry.

This is certainly not all—we introduced another brand new wizard to help you configure your project. You can find it in VS -> Telerik -> UI for WPF -> Configure project. That will bring you to the screen below:



Here you can choose the UI component(s) you need for your new project. Then, if you use our Implicit styles, you can get to the next step, where you can select the style of the components you like the most:

It's also a quick preview of all the built-in themes, where you can get an idea of how your WPF application will look.

We hope you're excited for this new feature, but don't worry—we didn't forget to include some improvements in the existing controls as well:

GridView

• Support for disabling the export of particular columns. GridViewDocumentExportOptions exposes a new property—ExcludedColumns of type IList. When a column is added to that collection, it will not be exported.
• Changing CreateItem method's access modifier from internal virtual to protected internal virtual.

ListBox

• A new property "IsScrollIntoViewEnabled" that allows selection of an item without scrolling to it is now available.

RibbonView

• RibbonWindow support for Windows 10 OS.

SpreadProcessing

• Implemented public API for retrieving the used cell range for a specific property.

You can find the full list of enhancements and fixes in the detailed release notes for WPF and release notes for Silverlight, and if you're curious about what's coming down the road, you can read about what's next. Don't hesitate to download the bits for WPF and Silverlight and give them a try too. Check out our WPF demos and Silverlight demos to get some ideas and inspiration, and don't forget to share all your thoughts and comments on our Ideas & Feedback portal.

Hello from Microsoft Connect(); 2015!

As I stroll the hallways of the Connect(); conference in NYC, I am happy to launch the public beta of Telerik UI for the Universal Windows Platform. This platform is the foundation for building all future Windows-based applications. And you can now get our tools for free!

Simply download the public beta from our site, and if you are one of the first one thousand people who download it you will receive a complimentary copy when the product goes live in early 2016. The suite comes with 19 UI controls for data visualization and manipulation. There’s also plentiful documentation and live demos, as well as the support you’ve become accustomed to over the past twelve years that we’ve been providing UI components for all Microsoft development platforms.

Now, on to Connect(); 2015. It’s a big day today if you are a .NET developer. Sure enough, various previews of Visual Studio 2015 have been around for quite a few months. But today it goes RTM. If you live and breathe .NET code, today is a big day, and one that will change how you work every day for quite some time to come. Of course, that’s not everything. In addition to Visual Studio 2015, we all are anticipating more great news around ASP.NET 5, MVC 6 and probably a few more secrets Scott Guthrie & Co. will announce.

We at Telerik are proud to be a part of Connect();. Today we are here with a customer, presenting a joint case study with Microsoft and Boston Heart Diagnostics. It’s a truly inspirational story about how Microsoft, Telerik and Progress products, in conjunction with Boston Heart Diagnostics’ subject matter expertise and vision, are together making a world of change in the “e-health” business. By connecting patients, doctors and dietitians through web and mobile interfaces, Boston Heart Diagnostics is able to provide superior care for their patients.

In 2015, the Telerik tools business grew at a fantastic rate. With more than 130,000 paying customers and a developer community of 1.7 million, Telerik has continued to sign new deals, expand current relationships and break into new markets. Customer wins during the last year include Microchip, Boston Heart Diagnostic and others. With announcements at Connect(); we expect many others to come.

Happy coding, and don’t forget to download the public beta of Telerik UI for Universal Windows Platform. I hope you are one of the first one thousand people to receive it for free when it launches. Only winners will be notified at the email address you used when you registered your UI for UWP beta. Rather than clutter this blog post with all the legal terms, you can see them all here.

Recursively yours,

Sasha

Only days after the formal announcement from Microsoft at Connect(), I am proud to inform you that our Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC product already supports the release candidate of the next major version of the .NET framework (ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6, respectively). This makes us the first major UI component vendor to officially integrate in the .NET 5 ecosystem. That means you can already plug our components in projects built with the new version of .NET, and leverage the new features it provides. Here you can find the up-to-date NuGet feed for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC (RC1) targeting .NET 5, MVC 6 and VS 2015.

This version of Microsoft ASP.NET is a major move from a closed-source framework supported and developed by a single vendor to an open-source web framework accepting contributions. It's also a shift from the ability to create Windows-only web apps to cross-platform development on Windows, Mac and Linux.

This means a lot to every .NET developer who was confined to the MS Windows world—until now. In a nutshell, here’s what ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 mean to you as a web developer:

•  You can now build cross-platform web applications for Windows, Mac and Linux OS utilizing the .NET Core Cross-Platform CLR for this purpose (optimized for cloud deployment as well). Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC already supports .NET Core CLR, and you can start creating web apps with it that target any of these operating systems.
•  You can also utilize new features available in ASP.NET MVC 6 with our UI for ASP.NET MVC product. These include view components, unified MVC, Web API and Entity Framework integrations as well as increased cross-platform productivity with Visual Studio Code, easy package and task management with Bower, NuGet, Grunt, and so on.
•  Host apps in IIS or self-host in your own processes. Also for the first time you can host different .NET framework versions side-by-side.
•  Simplified dependency management and integrated dependency injection.
•  Make use of the Visual Studio 2015 integration.
•  Legacy apps will continue to work with the full .NET 5 CLR (default for backwards compatibility), so you don’t have to worry about whether they’ll remain operational with the new .NET runtime.

Also have in mind that there’s already full-featured free version of Visual Studio (Community Edition) for students and small dev shops.

And there’s more!

To get started easily with the new major version of .NET and our MVC product, we exposed the following resources for you:

•  UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 offline demos package—a github repo hosting the offline version of the product examples built against the latest ASP.NET vNext RC1. You can also find instructions how to use the product in ASP.NET MVC 6 apps in our official docs.
•  UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 sample app—another github repository containing a simple responsive app compatible with ASP.NET vNext RC1 (updated from a previous sample). Since it is powered by the .NET Core runtime, the app is cross-platform and can be deployed on Linux and Mac OSX (see video below):
  

  
  
  
  (note that you can use either ‘dnu restore’ & ‘dnx web’ commands, or a Docker container to run .NET apps on Linux and Mac OSX)

Instructions how to install and configure ASP.NET 5 on Linux and Mac to run .NET apps on these operating systems can be found in the official ASP.NET 5 docs:

Installing ASP.NET 5 on Linux
Installing ASP.NET 5 on Mac OSX

You can also check our official MVC6 page for more details.

We are eager to hear what you think about the new ASP.NET, its features and the future of the .NET development. Furthermore, feel free to share how you will use our products in ASP.NET 5 projects to create astounding web experiences. Sound off in the comments section below!

During the Telerik DevCraft Q3 2015 Release Webinar we received lots of questions about Telerik Report Server—our solution for storing, managing and viewing reports that comes with a fully-featured standalone report designer. In the webinar recap blog post we promised to publish a separate post dedicated to your Report Server related questions. So here they are, the answers you waited for.

AUTHENTICATION

Q: Does the AD Authentication for report server include SSO with other ADFS authenticated applications?

A: Yes.

Q: Report Server is able to connect to AD. Is there a library for AD syncing for an ASP.NET MVC application?

A: No. The Report Server administrator should manually add each user who needs access to the Report Server. Then if the server authentication is set to use federation provider, the user will need to use their Active Directory credentials to log in. One of the reasons for this is that Telerik Report Server is licensed per domain + number of CALs/users that can access it, and each can have different permissions. In the future we will most likely add functionality where each user who provides proper AD credentials and is not a Report Server user will be automatically authorized as a read-only viewer, and will have access to only view specific reports.

AZURE SUPPORT

Q: Can Report Server use Azure as a Data Source?

A: Yes. An Azure SQL database can be used as a data source in the reports by utilizing the SqlDataSource component. It only needs a proper connection string to the Azure database.

Q: Can the Report Server be hosted on Azure as a web instance or is it a VM instance?

A: The Report Server should be installed only through its Windows installer as it configures a special Windows service for the scheduled tasks. On Azure VM this could be done by using a Remote Desktop connection.

COMPETITION

Q: How is Report Server different from other competing products such as List & Label?

A: The main difference between all report servers is the reports they support. Most of the report servers come with their own Report Designer or support reports built with a particular Report Designer. The Report Designer has a particular set of features to enable developers, end users or both to build reports. Though most of the Report Designers are very close in terms of the interface and features they provide, some are more suitable for specific cases than others. Another thing to look at is performance for the particular scenario and amount of data.

REPORT SERVER FEATURES

Q: How would a user can go about creating the report? Is there a separate plugin? Is this all web based?

A: The Report Server comes with a standalone desktop Report Designer which is not additionally paid for or installed. Implemented as a ClickOnce application, it is automatically downloaded and configured on the client when one creates a new report or edits an existing one. It’s necessary to download it once, and if you are a report editor or creator, you might not even need to log in to the Report Server application thanks to the tight server and designer integration.

Q: Is there support for Report Design in Visual Studio, or only in your included designer?

A: The Report Server supports only reports created with the standalone Report Designer (.trdx files). If you have reports created with the Visual Studio integrated report designer, you can easily convert them with the help of a wizard we have in the standalone Report Designer. Find more information here.

Q: Is the Report Server output format as nice as the rest of your DevCraft suite in various platforms (mobile, etc.)

A: Report Server is designed so that it and the reports it stores are accessible from the different form factors.

Q: Can you update a reports data source in Report Server? Example when in DEV we use a Demo Database.

A: You can design your report to use named connections. Then you can have different definitions for the connection string of this named connection on each computer the report is being tested on.

Q: Can the reports be scheduled based upon a data condition rather than a time schedule?

A: Currently no. Such functionality will be provided by the Data Alerts and Notifications features planned to be released first half of 2016.

Q: Can you install/setup multiple Instances of Report Server on the same IIS server?

A: No. Currently the Report Server installer installs only one instance of the Report Server per machine. We will provide the ability to install more than one instance of the Report Server on the same IIS in future.

LICENSING

Q: Can you explain what a 'Client Access License' is for Report Server? Does that mean simultaneous users of the Report Server web app?

A: No, the number of CALs is the total number of users, identified with their own user name and password, who are authorized to access the Report Server web application. That means they're authorized to do something with the reports there—to create or edit reports, to schedule tasks, to manage data connections or report server users, etc. Find more information here.

Q: How is the Report Server licensed? Will applications which integrate with the reports require extra licensing? Is it included in DevCraft subscription?

A: The Report Server is licensed per domain and number of CALs and is sold separately from DevCraft. However if you are a DevCraft user, contact sales@telerik.com to see if they can make a special offer for you. Applications that integrate with the Report Server through its API do not require additional payment.

REPORT PARAMETERS

Q: Does Report Server have the capability to save parameters for scheduled reports? Or can we setup parameters to the Report Server Scheduler so the reports distributed to users will be filtered based on the parameters specified?

A: Yes, this became possible as of the Q3 2015 SP1 release. Find more here.

TELERIK REPORT SERVER vs MS SSRS RS

Q: Does the Report Server support Data-Driven subscriptions (as it's called in SSRS) in the Scheduling, where different recipients get customized reports meaning different report parameters for each user?

A: We don’t support it yet. Currently you can’t pass the recipient name/email to the report so that the data is filtered for him/her. However we’ve been asked for that a few times now and we will make sure to add it in the next few versions.

Q: Does Telerik Report Server provide the capabilities to transform SSRS (RDL) reports to be used by the Report Server?

A: There is not such a converter currently and it is not planned for the next version. However the more requests we receive the faster we will add it to the roadmap. Vote for the item in our feedback portal to increase its priority.

Q: Are there any tutorials/steps/recommendations to migrate an app that uses SSRS to the Telerik Report Server?

A: As described above, we don’t have a migration tool yet. Currently you need to recreate the reports with the Telerik Report Designer and store them on the Report Server on your own.

Q: Doesn't SQL Report Server do lots of this? Is there a feature comparison between Telerik Report Server and SSRS? Is this report server like SSRS?

A: Telerik Report Server can be named similar to the SSRS Report Server. The main difference is that both support different reports, built with different report designers and supported by different reporting engines. And the more mature Telerik Report Server becomes, the more alike the features it’ll have.

What’s Next

If you still have questions that you’d like to ask, go ahead and post then in a comment below. If you’d like to share your feedback about the product or submit a feature request, please feel free, here’s the Report Server dedicated feedback portal.

See what’s coming in the next version on the roadmap page. Meanwhile, if you haven’t done it yet, try the latest version released earlier this month, play with the sample reports we’ve added there and test the enhanced scheduling functionality.

With our UI for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 2013 release we provided a new render mode for majority of our AJAX controls. We introduced modern lightweight rendering, which emphasizes semantic HTML & CSS3. With this mode we reduced the amount of markup our controls would spit out, and also made it easier to customize the controls. On top of that, we reduced on the number of image sprites we were using to just one. This meant that overall size of the skin and the complexity of skin decreased.

At present, 99% of the controls are lightweight and everybody can easily customize them using a new handy tool.

Introducing Telerik Theme Builder for ASP.NET AJAX

Let me introduce you to a new toy today. Theme Builder is a web application which can be used to create new Themes, or edit existing themes for AJAX controls which support LightWeight rendering mode. You will be able to create your own custom theme with just a few clicks using this new tool. You get complete control over the control’s elements. Once done with your changes, you can download it and use it in your project with just one click.

You can access Theme Builder here.

Theme Builder Features:

With the new Theme Builder tool, you will be able to do the following:

• Create New Theme

  Build a brand new theme for your AJAX controls. Download the custom theme and integrate in your project.

• Import Theme

  Import a theme that you have created previously. You can use that as a base for further customization.

• Import Bootstrap Theme
  You can import a Bootstrap Theme and customize it for AJAX controls.

Let’s go over the functionalities one by one.

Creating a New Theme

The new Theme Builder tool is the perfect tool for creating themes quickly and efficiently. You do not need to know the underlying HTML and CSS structure of the controls. Just provide your colors and create your custom LightWeight theme. Let’s walk through the process of creating a new theme. 

1. Head over to http://themebuilder.telerik.com
2. Click on the “Select” button under the “Create new theme” section
   
3. You will be presented with the Textbox. Type in a name for your theme and click “Enter.” Note: The name provided here cannot be changed later, so name your theme carefully.
   
4. Next, you will need to select one of the existing themes to start as a base (expect more base skins with different metrics and colors soon). You can select from Default or Bootstrap theme.
   
5. After that, you will need to select the controls for which you want to generate a custom theme. You can select one or all the controls and click “Create.” I am selecting the Notification control in this post:
   
6. Next you will be presented with an interface which provides the properties that can be changed, and a preview section. Changing properties is easy, as Theme Builder provides color pickers for customizing the appearance of the control. Changes made can be observed instantly with Theme Builder's “Apply changes instantly” option. If you are on a slow internet connection, you can uncheck this option to start with. In that case, perform all of your changes, and then when you are ready check the “Apply changes instantly” check box. Your changes will be applied in one shot.
   
7. If you want to add more controls to style, you can click on the "+" button provided at right top corner of the page. This will bring up the Controls selection interface. Select your controls and click on the “Update” button.
   
   
   

   Here is how the preview section will look like after adding additional controls. In this case, I have selected the Tile control to edit.
   

8. Finally, after you have made all your changes—click on the Download button. This will download your custom theme as a ZIP file. Here is the content of the ZIP file:
   
   
   
   As you see, we package the CSS file(s), images folder, ScssPrimitives.json & UsedControls.json files. The JSON files contain technical information about the colors and properties that you have chosen and the skin name. These files can be reused later for further customization of your skin(s), as explained in the next section on importing a theme.
9. Now that you have a custom theme downloaded, you can follow the help documentation on how to use a custom theme in your projects here.

Import a Theme

Previously we saw how to create a new theme. In this section we will see how to import a previously created custom theme and perform modifications. Let's take a look at a walk-through for importing a theme:

1. Head over to home page of Theme Builder
2. Click on the “Import existing theme” section
   
   
3. Next, you will need to click on the Select button and upload ScssPrimitives.json and UsedControls.json from your previously created custom theme. Then click on the Import button.
   
4. Theme Builder will read the uploaded files and set the stage for you to start editing the theme. Once imported, editing the theme is exactly the same as described in the above section on creating a new theme. Once you are done, just download the custom theme ZIP and use it in your projects.

That’s about importing an existing theme and editing it.

Importing Bootstrap Theme

So far we saw how to create a new theme and edit an existing theme. In this section we will take a look at how to import a bootstrap theme into Telerik Theme Builder and customize it. This particular feature is currently a work in progress and supports limited capabilities at the moment. Let’s take a lap around the steps involved:

1. First, get hold of config.json from your Bootstrap theme. You can get the config.json when from the Bootstrap customizer tool found here. For this exercise I went to the bootstrap customize tool page and clicked on the “Compile and Download” button. This will download a .zip file to your system. Unzip it to a folder and you will find the config.json file. We will need this file in next step.
2. Navigate to http://themebuilder.telerik.com. Select “Import Bootstrap theme.” Select the config.json file from your bootstrap theme.
   
3. Next, you will need to provide a name for your new theme.
4. Then select an existing theme as the base for your new theme. Also select the control(s) you want to customize.

Once you have done the above steps, the customization process is same as that of creating a new one.

Note that this feature as of now does not support LESS/SASS/CSS based files. Nor does this support formula based variables in your bootstrap files. As said earlier, this feature is still a work in progress—hence the BETA tag. Over the course of time we plan to greatly improve the Twitter Bootstrap theme conversion to Telerik Bootstrap Themes. We would love to hear your feedback on this. If you would like to share your scenarios & custom Twitter Bootstrap themes with us, please contact us at webforms@telerik.com.

This post was a quick whirlwind tour of our new feature, Telerik Theme Builder. Hope you like this feature and play around with it. We are eager to hear what you have to say.

1. Avoid Point Templates

2. Take Advantage of the Render Options

2.1 Use a Batch Render Mode for the Default Visuals

2.2 Use Direct2D or Bitmap

2.3 Freeze the Brush

3. Set the ItemsSource last

4. Disable the Automation Peers

5. Consider Using Sampling

The .NET framework has had quite the journey from conception until today. Yet, every iteration from .NET 1.0 to .NET 4.5 has almost invariably required kittens to die, as you painstakingly upgraded your apps and the .NET runtimes. The challenge, in part, was because of the giant monolithic .NET framework that all your apps depended on.

All that changes moving forward.

The new .NET framework is modern, lean, modular and open source. No longer is .NET a system-wide installation—it is merely a folder. Instead of a huge underlying framework, you only pick and choose the pieces of the .NET framework that you need in your apps. And more importantly, you can package the required components of the .NET framework right alongside your app. We’re entering an age of app-runtime silos and ultimate portability.

Not surprisingly, ASP.NET 5 is driving many of the changes in .NET, as shown in the 10,000-foot view below. ASP.NET 4.6 is the next full iteration of ASP.NET and it runs on the full API canvas of .NET 4.6—everything you do now in .NET runs just fine in this mode going forward. The new kids on the block are ASP.NET 5 and .NET Core 5 – both of them lean, modular, cross-platform and open source.

With ASP.NET 5, you could build your web app on one machine with a specific version of .NET runtime, and seamlessly move and run the app on another machine, with no installation required. This is possible not just between Windows machines, but even cross-platform across OSX or Linux. Portability of .NET—yes please!

Telerik UI

Want to spice up the UI for your MVC web apps? With Telerik® UI for ASP.NET MVC suite, you get 70+ polished and performant UI components powered by Kendo UI. You get server-side wrappers that emit clean HTML5/JS code on the client side, as well framework pieces and deep Visual Studio integration.

With ASP.NET 5 around the corner, you may be wondering how your beloved Telerik MVC UI suite will fare. Turns out, UI for ASP.NET MVC is as bleeding edge as you are. Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC suite already supports ASP.NET 5 RC1 release—the latest and greatest. This means you can leverage Visual Studio 2015 and the latest features of MVC 6 while utilizing Telerik UI for your next amazing web app.

How do you get started? Grab the latest Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 bits from the updated NuGet feed. Check your Visual Studio References folder to ensure that you are correctly using the Telerik MVC bits inside your existing MVC web project. With the bits ready, it’s time to have fun.

Going Cross-Platform

With ASP.NET 5 you have ultimate portability, and now you can use your favorite Telerik MVC UI controls for cross-platform apps! How? Simple—Telerik MVC apps can now run on top of the new .NET Core, and therefore are super portable.

Want to see Telerik UI going cross-platform in action? We have a sample app ready for you. Head out to the GitHub repo for the sample cross-platform app.

Here are the steps to run the app on a Mac:

1. Download the source code as a zipped file.
2. Unpack and take a look around.
3. Notice the Index.shtml view—it is rendering UI through the @HTML server-side Kendo helpers, just as would normally do in your MVC project. You’ll find the usual Grid, Menu, Buttons and more.
4. Make sure you have the right DNX version runtime. This particular app depends on the 1.0.0-rc1-update1 CoreCLR runtime; feel free to use ‘DNVM Use’ command to set the right DNX version, as below.
5. Run ‘DNU Restore’ to pull down and restore all NuGet packages.
6. Run ‘DNX Web’ to launch the entry point.
7. Launch browser and navigate to http://localhost:5004.

A native ASP.NET MVC app with Telerik UI controls—now running on a Mac. How cool is that! And you can not only run the app on OSX or Linux, but also do future development on these other platforms. How can you set up cross-platform support from the very start for your MVC projects? Simple—just meet the requirements and follow the steps below.

Here are the steps to run Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC cross-platform from scratch:

1. Start an ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio
2. Make sure you have the latest Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC bits, with support for ASP.NET 5 RC1
3. Utilize the Telerik MVC controls to build your desired UI
4. Set target framework to .NET Core. This can be done in VS Project Properties or through Project.JSON file by setting supported frameworks to ‘DNXCore50’
5. Move entire directory to OSX or Linux and run ‘DNU Restore’
6. To simply run the app locally on other platforms, package up the app using ‘DNU Publish’

You may call this an effort to democratize .NET and ASP.NET for every type of developer. Gone are the days of a high barrier to entry, massive installations and IDE lock-ins—you should be able to use ASP.NET 5 on any platform and using the editor of your choice. And Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC is right there to help spice up your app’s UI. Have fun!