Learn what to expect from Kendo UI in 2016 in terms of new development—features, integration with other JavaScript frameworks such as Angular v2 and React, and more.

As my colleague John Bristowe posted recently, Kendo UI and Angular have been a potent duo from quite some time now. We were among the pioneers to support the first version of the Angular framework starting back in 2013, and providing official supported integrations as part of our Kendo UI product from mid-2014 onward.

Angular has been progressively rising since then, with no indication that this is going to change in the foreseeable future. And it is one of the rare examples where an open source framework is so broadly adopted not only by SMBs, but by enterprises too. This can probably be justified by two main reasons:

1. Angular provides answers to most, if not all, burning questions about client app development and semantically structured code for developers coming from the world of structured languages, such as C#, .NET or Java.

2. Backed by Google. Provided that there’s a dedicated team of very experienced developers which fuels and drives the Angular train, this strengthens credibility and guarantees this is a supported growing framework which is here to stay, and won’t fade in oblivion as other JavaScript frameworks dominating in the past.

How Will Angular 2 Affect This Picture?

Angular 2 is a big step forward for the Angular framework, in terms of revamped and improved core architecture, observer pattern and data binding model, faster performance (up to 10x times in some cases), and concepts for (UI) components. The guys on the Angular team learned their lessons from Angular 1, and made changes accordingly for v2. All this comes with the price of major modifications and breaking changes compared to what we are familiar with in Angular 1.x.

There are also significant efforts from the Angular team focused on improving tooling, documentation and migration experience from Angular 1.x, the latter provisioned by the ng-upgrade and ng-forward Angular projects. 

Presently Angular 2 is in Beta, and has been since the second half of December 2015. There is speculation that the official release is expected to be in 2016, but so far there’s no official statement or evidence from Google about it.

Will Angular 2 be a hit? There are people who believe it will be, and there are others who think it may not be as successful as Angular 1 or other JavaScript frameworks. What is certain though is many developers are already looking into test-driving the new major version of Angular, and will most likely begin to adopt it in production around the end of 2016, or early 2017.

What’s Kendo UI Plan For Angular 2?

Kendo UI was one of the first major UI frameworks, if not the very first, to announce experimental support for the Angular 2 Preview back in September 2015. When the Angular 2 Beta came out in December of 2015, bringing a fundamental shift in the UI components paradigm, we realized that our experimental support for Angular 2 is no longer relevant, and will lead us to a dead end. That’s why we decided to abandon it and choose a radically new way to approach the Kendo UI integration with Angular 2.

Our ultimate goal is to rebuild the Kendo UI widgets and make them true UI components by the Angular 2 definition, with no jQuery dependency. This would basically result in a new subset of Kendo UI components, tailored to Angular 2, which can be integrated natively into Angular 2 applications.

As you might expect, the process of building Angular 2 UI components from the ground-up will require a considerable amount of time and engineering power to be done right.

1. First, we’ll start with components essential for building forms and collecting user input, such as dropdowns and comboboxes, calendar, date and time pickers, buttons and so forth.

2. Then we’ll continue with more complex components for building business UIs such as grid, charts, scheduler, spreadsheet, etc.

3. Next we’ll invest in creating internal infrastructure for continuous delivery, leveraging the popular NPM channel for package management and distribution. This way we’ll be able to easily publish what’s completed in each of our dev iterations and make it available to you right away.

To make our plan even more transparent, I can disclose some preliminary milestones and ETAs for deliverables with you (have in mind that these are subject to change and by no means final):

May 2016 (1st Wave)

• Dropdowns
• Date and Time Pickers
• Buttons
• Other Form Widgets (TBD)
• Tabstrip & Panelbar

September 2016 (2nd Wave)

• Chart/DataViz Preview
• Additional Form and Navigation Widgets

End of 2016 (3rd Wave)

• Chart/DataViz Beta
• Grid Preview
• Upload
• TreeView
• Other Widgets (TBD)

2017 (4th Wave)

• Rest of Remaining Kendo UI Widgets

Naturally, the development will be aligned with the current state of Angular 2 and upcoming versions of the framework in 2016, when at some point it is expected to reach RTM stage.

What About Other JavaScript Frameworks?

We won’t limit our focus on the integration with Angular 2 only. In parallel with the effort for removing the jQuery dependency and putting the basis of our UI components factory, we are also  going to deliver UI components for ReactJS in 2016. The roster for this ReactJS suite will pretty much follow the timeline for Angular 2 specified above, so if we can combine both into one visualization, here’s how it will look like:

How About The Existing Kendo UI Based On jQuery?

The existing jQuery-based Kendo UI widgets will continue to get our love (read: new additions) going into 2016. You can expect:

• Many Major Additions for the Html Editor widget
• New Features for the Grid, Chart and Spreadsheet
• Support for Bootstrap 4 and Visual Enhancements
• More App Templates and New Widgets
• Support for ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM in our ASP.NET MVC server wrappers + Tag Helpers

I've highlighted only the biggest goals in our 2016 plan, and there are many other features to be developed which I won’t unveil in this post. Stay tuned for our future roadmap blog posts for further details.

The Path Forward

A very exciting journey lies ahead of Kendo UI in 2016! We can’t wait to see how the most popular JavaScript and HTML UI library will evolve to conquer new worlds and the hearts of Angular and React developers around the globe. You’re welcome to join us in this journey and open new horizons in front of you for creating amazing experiences for the mobile web!

• New Spreadsheet features
• Updated documentation
• The new “disable dates” feature for the Calendar and DataPicker widgets
• Cross platform development and deployment of MVC apps
• A look at MVC 6 TagHelpers
• An update on the future of Kendo UI widgets

The webinar will be hosted by Burke Holland, and the topics will be discussed by T.J VanToll, Cody Lindley, Jen Looper, and Ed Charbeneau. Make sure you sign up to attend.

Why Attend the Kendo UI Webinar?

Typically we keep the excitement under wraps until the webinar, but this time we're not going to make you wait. We have some exciting news to share today. In 2016 we’ll start releasing new Kendo UI Angular 2 & React components built from the ground up with no jQuery dependency. This will be the next evolution of Kendo UI. We’ll fill in some more details during the webinar. So attend! Attending will allow you to pepper us with questions at the end.

If finding out about the evolution of Kendo UI and interacting with us isn’t enough to motivate attendance, consider that just by showing up (and living in the U.S.) you could end up winning one of the following prizes:

• A XYZprinting Da Vinci 1.0 3D Printer
• A LEGO Mindstorms Programmable EV3 Customizable Robot with Sensors
• A Roku 4

What you can do Before the Release/Webinar

If you are uninitiated in the ways of a Kendo UI release, allow me to explain what is available for consumption before the official release:

• Consider watching the previous webinar just to make sure you are already caught up on Kendo UI changes and features.
• Review the questions and answers from the previous webinar.
• Read the R1 release blog post, so you have a general idea of what is new in the upcoming release.
• Take the new Kendo UI code for a test drive in your own code context. If you are an active Kendo UI trial or commercial license holder, you can find the beta bits in your Telerik account for download. Or, if all you need is the minified code, you can pull the pre-release code from the official Kendo UI CDN.

Set a Reminder

We’ve heard your demands for a time span picker and we’ve answered them. No more using two date time pickers to setup your time intervals. We are happy to introduce the brand new RadTimeSpanPicker.

Default Components

We provide five default time span part components so you can easily set up the time intervals you wish to pick: DayTimeSpanComponent, HourTimeSpanComponent, MinuteTimeSpanComponent, SecondTimeSpanComponent and MillisecondTimeSpanComponent.

Each default component has three properties that determine the values available for picking: Minimum, Maximum and Step. When these properties are set the component’s ItemsSource is populated with decimal values that start from the Minimum value and end with the Maximum value, each time incremented with the Step value.

For example, if we wish to be able to pick intervals of time by day, but no more than 20 days, we should just add a DayTimeSpanComponent to our RadTimeSpanPicker and set its Maximum property:

Below you can find a sample definition of a RadTimeSpanPicker:

When we set the GenerateDefaultComponents = true we set up our RadTimeSpanPicker to include three components: one HourTimeSpanComponent, one MinuteTimeSpanComponent and one SecondTimeSpanComponent with their default values for Minimum, Maximum and Step.

The five default components make the setup of a regular RadTimeSpanPicker very easy and fast.

Custom StepTimeSpanComponent

However, there might be more custom scenarios that require custom time span components. We’ve provided a way to handle that too.

For example, let’s say we want to be able to pick week intervals. To achieve this we would need to create a custom StepTimeSpanComponentand override its GetTicksForItem() method that returns a TimeSpan as ticks value corresponding to the passed item from the ItemsSource:

Then just add it as component for our RadTimeSpanPicker:

The default components as well as the custom WeekTimeSpanComponentrely on their Minimum, Maximum and Step properties to generate their ItemsSource. 

Custom TimeSpanComponentBase

However, there might be scenarios when we would like to set the ItemsSource of our custom component ourselves.

For example, if we wish to create a composite component that accepts TimeSpan values that can be any size of time interval: 1 hour, 5 days, 1 week, etc. We can achieve that by creating a custom TimeSpanComponentBase:

Then just add it as component for our RadTimeSpanPicker:

For more details about RadTimeSpanPicker you can visit our online documentation and take a look at our demos.

Go ahead and try it out, create your custom components and let us know what you think about it.

This post provides an overview of our recent webinar for the R1 2016 release of Telerik DevCraft. If you missed it, you can also watch the video right here.

Earlier this week, Ed Charbeneau and I hosted webinars that provided an overview of all the latest and greatest features we shipped in the R1 2016 release of Telerik DevCraft. From the new spreadsheet control in Kendo UI and UI for ASP.NET MVC to the official release of our UI controls for Univeral Windows Platform (UWP), we covered a massive amount of content that highlighted everything that is awesome in Telerik DevCraft. Other highlights included:

• More templates, sample apps and better documentation for the web UI suites
• Official release of AutoCompleteTextView for iOS
• Windows Universal (8.1) support for SideDrawer for Xamarin.Forms
• Desktop UI improvements including a new control and theme for WPF
• Report sharing and improved scheduling logic in Report Server

Relive the Webinar

If you were unable to watch the webinar, don't worry. We posted the recording of the webinar up on YouTube for you to watch in its entirety and in high definition!

Prize Winners

Of course, it wouldn't be a webinar by Telerik without some cool prizes. This time around, we decided to give a prize to the attendee with the best question. We also picked a lucky attendee-at-random just to make things fun. Here are your winners:

Session 1: Robby Dyson (Microsoft Surface 3) and Scott Horrocks (Apple Watch)
Session 2: Brick Baldwin (Microsoft Surface 3) and Chris Barber (Apple Watch)

Congratulations to all our winners!

Questions and Answers

We received over 200 questions in total during the webinars. Unfortunately, we weren't able to answer all of them during the webinar. We're currently working on a blog post that will provide a rundown of the top questions that were asked during the webinar. We'll be publishing this blog post next week so stay tuned for that (Update: Here it is!). In the meantime, take a moment to register for our next big webinar featuring Kendo UI on February 17!

How Do You Define a Roadmap?

As you may already know from past Kendo UI iterations and roadmap prioritization, the outcome from the following areas strongly influences the development direction of the product:

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

With this in mind, here are our objectives and key deliverable for R2 2016, expected in the beginning of May.

Angular 2 and React Integrations (Previews)

As I already elaborated on in an earlier blog posted in January, two major initiatives we are going to execute on this year are to deliver native Angular 2 and React integrations for Kendo UI. This would require removing the jQuery dependency and building Kendo UI components (on top of a common codebase) that align with the Angular 2 and React component concepts. It will also involve supporting a continuous delivery model via npm modules distribution for these integrations. Read more details in the blog linked above.

We see that these two frameworks are already getting great momentum and gradual adoption, and the future of the mobile web will definitely be influenced by the path they set forward.

The so-called 'first wave' of Kendo UI components for Angular 2 and React is expected to be released to the public around R2 2016 (May). Moreover, the npm distribution might also allow us to disclose very early pre-Alpha bits even a month or so earlier, so stay tuned for more info in the coming months!

Bootstrap 4 and SASS Support

    

Another major piece of our R2'16 story will be the support for the next major version of the renowned Bootstrap framework (v4), and the introduction of SASS support for Kendo UI with a new Bootstrap 4 theme. With it we'll expose SASS variables as a theming API, and allow the translating of Bootstrap 4 SASS variables into Kendo UI widget configuration variables using SASS imports for this purpose.

As an end result, you'll be able to plug this mechanism seamlessly into your project when using the regular SASS styling workflow, and make the Kendo UI pieces blend with the style definitions of a Bootstrap 4 theme you chose for the project.

HTML Editor Features

With R2 our HTML Editor widget will receive some notable updates. It'll incorporate support for markdown (import and export), URL auto-detection and some other enhancements, which will make it even more flexible for your needs when editing HTML content.

VS Scaffolding Additions

The Visual Studio Scaffolder for Kendo UI widgets will be extended to support auto code generation for the TreeView. This will allow you to apply configuration settings and connect it to data by creating the respective controller-model relation and view from the Scaffolder UI.

Spreadsheet Enhancements

The Spreadsheet widget, officially released in R1 2016 and a cornerstone for building Excel-like interfaces for business web apps, will also receive updates and enhancements in the R2 timeframe. It'll become even more powerful and friendly to Excel-savvy users.

ASP.NET MVC Wrappers

ASP.NET Core 1.0 and MVC 6 Support

The RC2 and RTM releases of ASP.NET Core 1.0 (former ASP.NET 5 Core) and MVC 6 are coming in 2016, with no definite ETAs from Microsoft yet, as you can see from the public ASP.NET Core 1.0 Roadmap page. Regardless, our Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC product already supports ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC1, and we'll extend this support to the upcoming RC2 and RTM updates.

Furthermore, a set of Tag Helpers for the ASP.NET MVC server wrappers of Kendo UI widgets (where applicable) are also within our scope towards R2'16. See how their syntax will look here.

New Visual Studio Dashboard Project Template

We'll also be expanding the set of predefined Visual Studio Project Templates for UI for ASP.NET MVC with a new Dashboard-like template, based on the Kendo UI App Template definition shipped in R1 2016. This template will become available with the R1 2016 SP1 release of the product, due in March.

VS Scaffolding Additions and More

With R2 our MVC Scaffolding utility will incorporate scaffolding capabilities for the TreeView MVC server wrapper. This will save you the hassle of manually generating boilerplate code for connecting a view (which hosts the treeview) to a controller and the corresponding model definition.

In addition, we'll introduce the option to assign a share data source among several MVC server wrappers, which is one of the most requested new features voted on our feedback portal.

How'll This Work for Me?

Wanna tell us how you are going to make use of these planned new additions for Kendo UI in your existing or future projects? Be the first to share in the comments section below. Also keep in mind that we operate in a dynamic environment, and our preliminary plans might undertake some changes going forward.

Got Feedback?

If you have suggestions or feature requests, visit our Feedback portal and submit them so they can be reviewed and voted on by the community, and prioritized for future development.

With every official release we introduce a bunch of features and improvements, and as a rule suggest you use the latest version of our controls in order to get the most out of them. Although we are doing our best to avoid introducing changes that affect the public API, sometimes the product has to be changed in order to improve.

We have been reviewing your feedback regarding the upgrade process and noticed that in some cases upgrading is not a straightforward task. This inspired us to create the Telerik Upgrade API Analyzer tool and to make upgrading easier for you.

This tool could help you determine a problematic area when upgrading your WPF, WinForms or ASP.NET Web Forms application with a newer version of our controls. It analyzes your project, notifies you when a mismatch is found and points out the exact piece of code that should be modified. But, let’s start from the beginning…

How to Get It?

The Telerik Upgrade API Analyzer has a pretty simple interface. All you need to do is:

1. Choose the platform
2. Select the current version of Telerik assemblies you are using
3. Select the version you would like to upgrade to

Keep in mind that the items of the three combo boxes are generated on the fly depending on your choices, and you should select the desired values consecutively.

When you are ready with this, open the solution you are planning to upgrade. The tool will start analyzing automatically and will show the differences between the selected versions, which affect the code used in the particular solution.

The result shows you the exact places in the code which should be modified if you upgrade to the new version of our controls. It pinpoints the exact line and character where a modification would be required. 

From the report you can also see what the change is (Deleted/Modified/Obsoleted) and which node of the code has been modified (i.e., is it a class, a method or a property). For some of the cases a “What to do now?” message is displayed. We are planning to expand this functionality to cover all changes with a user-friendly message.

The Telerik Upgrade API Analyzer uses our RadGridView for WPF for presenting the results and you can take advantage of its grouping, resizing, sorting and filtering in order to arrange the data in the most comfortable way.

Save it for Later

You have the ability to save the gathered information for a later moment through the Export button in the upper right corner. The data will be arranged and exported to an HTML document.

Stay Tuned for More

The Telerik Upgrade API Analyzer is a subject of current and future development and in its next versions you’ll be able to take advantage of even more handy functionalities. The tool will check for updates automatically and will notify you with a dialog when a new version is available so you are always up-to-date.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a specific version of Visual Studio in order to use the Upgrade API Analyzer?

No. The Upgrade API Analyzer is a standalone application and it does not require nor depend on Visual Studio installation. The tool requires Roslyn and .NET minimal version of 4.5.1. If they are not installed, it will prompt to install them for you.

Which versions of Telerik controls the tool supports?

You can use the analyzer to help you upgrade projects using versions later than Q1 2015. 

We Really Appreciate Your Feedback!

We have created this analyzer based on our customers’ feedback. Now, we are publishing a prototype version of Telerik Upgrade API Analyzer to our community and will be very happy to hear your feedback about it. Sharing your thoughts will help us in finding what features you need most and how to prioritize our plans for adding more features for you. Please, don’t hesitate to send us any comments you may have at UpgradeApiAnalyzer@telerik.com.

During our Telerik DevCraft R1 2016 release webinar, we received far too many questions to answer at the time. Today, your questions are answered!

Last week, we hosted the Telerik DevCraft R1 2016 release webinar, featuring everything that's new in the Telerik DevCraft suite of tools. Overall, the webinar was a huge success. We had over 200 questions asked in about 60 minutes. Now, I don't know about you, but my typing speed isn't at the rate it needs to be to answer that many questions in that short of a time period. So naturally we decided to answer your questions in a blog post. As promised, here they are!

We had a lot of questions about the (new) spreadsheet control and Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX and Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC. We also had a lot of questions covering our other products as well. I’ve tried to summarise the top questions we received in this blog post. Hopefully, your question is answered here. If it isn’t or you have a question about any of our products, please feel free to submit a question below!

Questions about the Spreadsheet

Is the spreadsheet resizeable?
Yes, the spreadsheet can be set to any size and can shrink/grow with the element container or viewport.

Does the spreadsheet have Excel-like functions such as VLOOKUP?
Yes! Check it out on our list of formulas page.

Is there Excel provider in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC or Kendo UI similar to the one for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX?
No, this is for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX only. The spreadsheet in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC is easily saved, imported, and exported using JSON.

Can we create multiple sheets and toggle between them?
Multiple sheets per document are supported. A tab strip at the bottom of the UI is used to toggle between sheets.

What is the maximum number of rows you can load into the spreadsheet control?
In general, the spreadsheet does not have any restriction for the number of rows or columns it can hold. We grow the spreadsheet in terms of memory usage as it’s needed. It’s more a constraint of your available memory for the browser. Be aware that loading massive amounts of data into the spreadsheet may take some time.

Can we pull out the spreadsheet data and do other things with it other than just save back to the same file? Like looping through the cells and stuff? We’re looking for an OWC replacement so we’re wondering if it will be able to do most of the same things.
The spreadsheet control has a robust API for managing data. You can import data into the spreadsheet as well as export it out through JSON. The spreadsheet features a built-in export-to-Excel functionality which is also fully actionable in the browser.

Is it possible to import data from Microsoft Excel and use the new spreadsheet to make the changes then save the data into SQL Server?
Yes! Please watch our previous webinar for a similar example.

Is the Excel style filtering also available in Kendo UI or is it limited to Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC?
Excel filtering is available for Kendo UI, Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC, and Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX.

How easy is it to load data from the Kendo UI Grid control into the spreadsheet control?
VERY easy. Seriously.

Does the spreadsheet provider respect any restrictions (i.e. editable cells) that are in the original document?
Please refer to this discussion.

Would you be able to save the spreadsheet directly into a back-end database (e.g. Oracle)?
Of course. You could export in-memory and push to a remote endpoint that would persist the data to an underlying database.

Can you have a spreadsheet where you have the basics set up including formulas and have some fields locked out so that the user can only make some changes and save them?
Please refer to this discussion.

Is there a way to have a hybrid of the spreadsheet control and a GridView control where you just have the cells from the spreadsheet without the Excel-style header, but you get the formula processing of the spreadsheet?
Currently, there is not. Please visit feedback.telerik.com and submit a suggestion if you would like to see a feature added.

Can we control the mode of the spreadsheet (read-only vs editable)?
Please refer to this discussion.

The spreadsheet import process doesn’t persist data validation list rules when imported. Would that be a future supported functionality?
If there is a specific feature like this one that you would like to see added to the spreadsheet then please visit feedback.telerik.com and let us know. We use this portal to gauge our customers needs and to prioritize our road maps.

Are all Excel formulas included in the spreadsheet control? Where can we find a complete list of available formulas?
We have published a list of formulas that we support in the spreadsheet control.

I’ve found that colors aren’t preserved when importing spreadsheets with conditional formatting. Would there be future support for conditional formating validations?
The import function doesn’t preserve everything at the moment. The original goal was to get the data imported correctly. Our plan is to improve it over time. We are working to improve this aspect of the spreadsheet control.

Can you do SQL Server CRUD integration with the ASP.NET MVC spreadsheet control?
Yes, this is done through the DataSource component that’s bound to the spreadsheet itself.

Is it possible (out-of-the-box) to use SQL Server as the backend data source? Then, allow the user to edit the data in the spreadsheet control and save the data back to the SQL Server. Basically, letting the user do their CRUD operations through a spreadsheet. That is where a lot of users are used to doing CRUD.
Is this for UI for ASP.NET MVC? If so then it’s a yes and no answer. The spreadsheet is bound to the DataSource component, which is a fundamental aspect of our framework. This DataSource needs to be bound to some backend data. However, most database admins that I know would NEVER expose SQL Server (or any other database) directly and publicly. So, in order to get around this, why not create a simply CRUD-oriented service endpoint? That would totally meet your needs.

Are there plans to SharePoint enable the spreadsheet control?
Not explicitly, no. However, why not host it inside a Web Part? That should work.

Is there some support for Power Pivot functionality in spreadsheet control in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX?
Pivots are not available. Please request this feature at feedback.telerik.com!

Is there an equivalent SpreadsheetDocumentProvider for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC?
No, this feature is for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX only. The spreadsheet in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC can be easily saved, imported, and exported via JSON.

Questions about Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX and Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC

Can we export data bound to a DataGrid directly to the new spreadsheet control, as opposed to forcing the user to download the XLS?
Yes, almost any scenario can be resolved using either AJAX callbacks or the Document Processing API.

How extensive is the enabling of lightweight rendering?
You can enable lightweight rendering per control or per project. Lightweight rendering emits HTML5 and CSS3 and you will see proper semantic tags throughout.

Does the Kendo UI grid filter allow you to filter to null values?
Yes, it’s now supported in the latest release.

We have a legacy web application built on an earlier version of Telerik. We have upgraded to the current Telerik library. The app was pre-MVC but is an ASP.NET app. Can we integrate the new stuff with our platform?
ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC can run side-by-side so you should be able to do this. Of course, that’s a very “it depends” answer. It’s best to build your new stuff on the latest and greatest and then migrate everything over part-by-part.

Which has the more developed controls, Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC or Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX? And, if Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC is more developed, will it always lead Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX?
Our ASP.NET AJAX controls have been around longer. However, they target different environments and have difficult dependencies.

Are there any useful extensions/plugins you’d recommend for Visual Studio Code for helping when using Kendo UI?
We’re evaluating our list of extensions for Visual Studio to see what we can move over to VS Code. Mind you, VS Code has a lot of great extensions for JavaScript development.

Does Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC auto-scale for mobile devices? Or, are there mobile-specific controls you need to use?
Our controls are responsive and adaptive. Of course, you need to use a grid system and our Responsive Panel.

Is RenderMode="Lightweight" supported with Microsoft Edge?
Yes. Lightweight rendering is ideal for modern browsers. However, legacy browsers like IE6–7 could present some challenges.

I know there is tight integration for Angular2 but has anything considered AureliaJS?
We’re are exploring support for Aurelia. Please check this blog post for extra info.

Is there some SharePoint 2013/SharePoint 360 support for the spreadsheet control in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX?
You could host the spreadsheet in a webpart. However, out-of-the-box support isn’t available at this point in time.

Is it possible to search nested grids? Is it possible to search the child elements as well inside the filter seach?
Yes, the built-in filtering is separate and isolated. That means that filters applied on nested girds won’t impact their parent. Also, if parents are filtered and that filter takes out a child grid then the filtering is preserved.

Is the full text search available in grid for Telerik UI for ASP.NET or Kendo UI?
See this forum post.

Where is the line drawn when choosing either a simple .NET vs a MVC website?
Well, that depends on your requirements and your skill set. I’ll assume you’re using ASP.NET MVC. If that’s the case then ASP.NET MVC gives you more control over your markup. At the end of the day, I would go with whatever your team is more familiar with.

Is the material theme available in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC?
Yes! Check it out through our Theme Builder tool.

Will Telerik Theme Builder for ASP.NET AJAX allow us to chose between Bootstrap 3 and Bootstrap 4?
Currently, the Telerik Theme Builder for ASP.NET AJAX supports Bootstrap 3.

Does Kendo UI use and/or support Sass?
Currently, Kendo UI has .less support. However, with Bootstrap 4 moving to Sass we are considering .sass for future releases.

What’s the best way to integrate ASP.NET AJAX responsiveness with Bootstrap?
First, enable the Bootstrap theme on the project. Then, set the rendering mode to auto; this will enable responsive/adaptive behaviors on all controls.

Would we see Sass templates support in addition to Less?
Since Bootstrap 4 will be based on Sass, this is something we are considering for future releases.

When will you add the Excel-like filtering for the RadGrid in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX?
It’s already there as part of the R1 2016 release.

Microsoft has confused me to no end with this name change to ASP.NET Core 1.0. What does that mean for MVC 6? Does that mean MVC 6 is still only a part of core? Or, will it also be part of the full 4.6 stack?
Recently, the ASP.NET team changed the name of its framework from ASP.NET 5 to ASP.NET Core 1.0. For more information about this change, please refer to Scott Hanselman’s blog post entitled, ASP.NET 5 is dead - Introducing ASP.NET Core 1.0 and .NET Core 1.0.

Where can we sign up for Kendo UI webinar?
The Telerik Kendo UI Q1’16 Release Webinar takes place on February 17 at 11AM EST. Sign up today!

Will Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX support ASP.NET Core 1.0 with DNX and ASP.NET AJAX soon?
ASP.NET Core 1.0 does not currently support ASP.NET Web Forms. Microsoft would need to add Web Forms support to make this possible.

We are planning on migrating our applications from Silverlight. What are the functional gaps between the Telerik’s Silverlight UI controls and the ASP.NET MVC controls?
That’s a difficult question to answer since they target very different runtimes. Currently, 70+ controls are available with Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC. I would recommend having a look and see where the gaps are based on your requirements.

Will future versions of Kendo UI implement the current Web Components standard?
We announced support for Web Components back in July 2015. Since that time, we’ve shipped support for Web Components in Kendo UI. Please check out our documentation on the subject for more information.

How does one migrate a project with an older version of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX to the latest version?
First, back-up your project. (Always do this. Source control helps here.) Next, right-click on the solution in Visual Studio and use the configure/update project wizard.

Do the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX themes support the W3C accessbility standard AAA, by default?
Telerik ASP.NET controls are Section 508-compliant and follow the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 for level A, AA, or AAA compliance. Also, all components strictly follow W3C specifications to be XHTML1.1-compliant and most of them are HTML5-compliant.

Is the Touch Manager you’ve released for WPF planned for ASP.NET MVC?
We have no plans at this time.

Does changing the hosting platform affect the output of the UI in any way? Or, is the hosting on Ubuntu as seamless as it is on Windows?
Kendo UI is built around a combination of front-end resources like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Hosting shouldn’t be an issue. That stated, the server wrappers we’ve built for ASP.NET MVC are a different animal. The good news is that our latest version of Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC supports ASP.NET MVC Core, allowing you to run cross-platform.

Is there a similar theme builder for Kendo UI with AngularJS?
I’m not sure how to answer that. Our themes are based on CSS. So, it’s what you emit as markup that’s important.

Is there a plan to support a export to DOCX functionality from the Kendo UI Editor similar to what the spreadsheet control can do with export to Excel?
PDF export is available since Q1 2015. DOCX export is set for future consideration.

Does the spreadsheet control for Kendo UI support live integration with Kendo UI charts?
Yes, this is facilitated through the DataSource component. For Kendo UI charts, you simply need to respond (accordingly) to the changes that are made through it.

Does the spreadsheet control for Kendo UI support tab/enter and shift+tab/enter for keyboard navigation between cells (like in Excel)?
Yes, this behavior is the same.

Does the spreadsheet control for Kendo UI provide formulas to calculate values across other cells (like excel)? Is there a mechanism to add custom formulas to this list?
Yes, you can simply reference cells in your formulas. It’s just like Excel. Custom formulas are done through configuration.

Does your date picker have a time picker as well?
Yep. Check it out here!

Miscellaneous Questions

What is a XAML?
eXtensible Application Markup Language

I like the searchable GridView in Telerik UI for WPF. However, it seems too simple to use. There are any boundaries to just turning it on?
It’s customisable if that’s what you’re asking.

Does ShowSearchPanel default to false for the GridView in Telerik UI for WPF?
Yes, it does.

Are the XAML declarations created for me when I drag the controls on to my Xamarin.Forms page?
This depends on your development environment. We have controls for Visual Studio that support the visual designer.

Can the gesture manager be used to create your own gestures? For example, using two figures in a swirling motion to change values in a gauge.
Our touch support is listed here.

Does code interoperability exist besides iOS, Android, and Windows 10 with your UI controls?
That scenario is supported through Xamarin. And yes, we have controls for Xamarin: Telerik UI for Xamarin.

You have shown some great resources for native mobile development. In your opinion, how does the Telerik Platform fit into the overall mobile development strategy?
We have a number of great backend services available. It’s a peanut butter and chocolate combination!

What’s the best way of using an entity data source and CRUD on procedures in the database server? I’d suggest checking out the numerous articles on MSDN relating to this topic since it’s outside the scope of Telerik’s products. There’s also a number of courses covering this up on PluralSight.

When developing for ASP.NET Core 1.0 to run on any server, is the .NET code the same as if developing for IIS? In other words can I decide to move it to a non-Windows server at a later time and expect it to work the same?
Generally-speaking, yes. That’s the goal.

As changes are made to UI is there any consideration to updating the existing demo projects on the forums?
Some of them that are highly visited don’t necessarily function for current versions of UI or were built on older versions of visual studio and take additional work to get to a usable state for reference. We try very hard to keep the demos up-to-date. However, they aren’t always updated entirely because parts of each UI library change from release to release. If you do spot something that’s broken then please let us know!

Have Another Question?

We've tried to answer some of the most common questions here. However, if you have a question that's not here or a feature request that isn't addressed, please feel free to leave a comment below or over in our Feedback Portal.

See what's coming in the second major release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX for 2016, including new skin effects and enhancements.

Building on the changes we released in R1, some great skin effects and enhancements are coming in R2 2016 for Telerik ASP.NET AJAX. They will not only improve the look and feel of the controls, but also unify their rendering and make them more customizable—features requested by all of you!

Let me begin with the lovely and multi-functional Theme Builder, followed by a list of the most valuable improvements.

Theme Builder and More

The Theme Builder is going to become more powerful and allow you to create, improve and/or customize the Material, Silk, Glow and MetroTouch skins.

Along with them, you will be able to style all currently missing controls—Cloud Upload, Gantt, Media Player, Image Gallery, Light Box, Site Map, Spell, Spreadsheet and Wizard.

In addition, we will be looking into the possibility of including support for Bootstrap 4 Themes. This will allow you to import Twitter Bootstrap themes and convert them to Telerik skins that the controls can be styled with.

And that‘s not all! You’ll be able to take advantage of a number of underlying or visible improvements in the controls’ appearance, such as:

• Ripple effect for the Material Skin—yes, we know that this theme is very trendy and we will continue to enhance it.
  
• Silk and Glow skin refactoring and improvements.
• Remove font family and font size from the controls—this is pretty handy, because the controls will inherit the default font settings of the page where they reside. Due to the high flexibility of the controls’ rendering and you can always tweak them further and apply your own font settings.
• Font Icons enhancements to make the icons crisper and nicer looking, with unique identifiers.
• Focus and Active States of the controls.
• Primary buttons will be included in more controls to enrich their usability.

That’s not all, folks—the benefits for you are even bigger. They concern some of the most popular controls, including Spreadsheet, Grid and others. 

Spreadsheet

With the upcoming R1 2016 SP1 release, we are going to provide the full set of skins for the spread. Additionally the R2 release will bring you built-in import capabilities from the popular XLSX file format.

Grid

RadGrid will become more useful, with the following new features that we know the community has been anticipating:

• Built-in Print button
• Ability to hide the context button for some columns
• KeepInScreenBounds functionality for the Edit popup
• Persisting checked items in the check list filtering of the grid (Persistence Framework)

RadEditor

The Table Wizard and Management experience will be greatly enriched through the new context menu and redesigned Table Wizard.

New CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls

The new lightweight and easy to use RadCheckBoxList and RadRadioButtonList controls will be of help in your everyday work.

Useful How-To Articles and Advanced Tutorials

We do appreciate your valuable feedback from the annual AJAX survey 2015. We'll do our best to make the support resources—especially the "How-To" articles—more visible and accessible by search engines, and will produce even more useful tutorials. You can also expect a new Outlook-inspired Visual Studio project template as well as redesigned and modern looking Sales Dashboard sample app.

We take you quickly through the most interesting additions in the R2 2016 official release. 

Based on our research and your feedback, we've put together a list of the most interesting additions in the R2 2016 official release for UI for WPF and Silverlight. Let's walk through them together.

New Controls

Layout for WPF

We will introduce a new addition to our UI for WPF suite—the Layout control. It will streamline the way you arrange all other components in your WPF project.

New Integration Demo

ERP System

This time we’ll join the forces of our components and will show you a simplified implementation of one of the most popular business scenarios in modern business—an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. It will use the data from the popular Adventure Works database.

New Features

Docking for WPF

We are working on introducing the option to implement custom logic for saving and loading the layout of Docking component.

GridView for WPF

Pinned (Frozen) rows will allow you to anchor rows to the top of RadGridView.

SpreadProcessing

A new API which will allow the generation of XLSX documents with minimal memory consumption and excellent performance. Export large datasets to XLSX in a matter of seconds.The cells are created, formatted, written to the XLSX file stream and disposed consecutively one by one, which significantly reduces memory consumption.

PivotGrid

Based on some feedback we are going to add the option to exclude the null values from the Aggregate functions.

We Value Your Opinion

We're always cooking up new enhancements, like our new Upgrade API Analyzer, newly exposed TouchManager, and lots more.

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 on the WPF Feedback portal, where they can be liked and prioritized by the community. 

There are many choices when it comes to building SPAs with AngularJS. We've asked our developers to share the best tools they use to get the job done right.

So you’re starting a new project and want to build a single-page application (SPA) using AngularJS. Being one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks today, there are dozens of tools that can make your work easier. The question is, which ones to choose.

To help you get a running start, we asked our developers to list their most precious AngularJS (1.x) dev tools based on several months of evaluation and experience. It is only natural that the front-end stack has overtaken much of the article. Still, we have added their choices of back-end and testing tools for completeness:

Back-End Tools

Express Server Running on Node.js

Express is the most common choice for application framework when it comes to Node.js development. We use it because it is very easy to get started with and there are tons of support resources on the web.

Open API Initiative (Formerly Swagger)

Open API Initiative is our developers’ favorite specification for kick-ass RESTful APIs. The implementation is usually done with express and swagger-node-express. The new generic name is a little unfortunate, though.

Build Tool/Task-Runner

Now, we know that a lot of developers prefer not to use a task-runner or any build automation tool at all, but it saves a lot of time and repetitive effort, and we’re sold on them. While we started with Grunt, we switched to Gulp because it allowed us to write our build file in pure JavaScript. No need for complex configurations, as was the case with Grunt. Plus, we found Gulp to be faster and the better performing of the two.

UI Components

You guessed it—we walk the walk by relying on our own Kendo UI HTML5 and JavaScript framework for its integration with Angular via built-in directives. It has a vast number of highly evolved UI components; the Grid widget alone has over 100 features. One of the best things about using UI components is the amount of time and effort they save from having to build (often complex) elements from scratch—ours have taken us literally years to develop.

CSS

We use Sass for writing the CSS. It is far more powerful than writing vanilla CSS as it provides useful abstractions to avoid repetition and save time. Compared to LESS, it is more verbose, which in our case is a good trait.

We have the following Gulp plugins for Sass-to-CSS compilation:

• gulp-sass plugin, which is unequivocally described as a "very light-weight wrapper around node-sass, which in turn is a Node binding for libsass, which in turn is a port of Sass"
• gulp-autoprefixer for automatic injection of browser prefixes
• gulp-sourcemaps for, well, source-maps generation

Development Time Productivity Tools

Browser Sync

Browser sync helps you test your app browser support by cutting repetitive manual tasks. “It’s like an extra pair of hands. Customise an array of sync settings from the UI or command line to create a personalised test environment,“ reads its webpage.

Wiredep

All SPA applications have an index page, which often includes many scripts and styles tags. It is very tedious to maintain them manually and add a new script/style tag whenever there is something new. Wiredep solves this problem by adding scripts/styles tag whenever a new dependency is added to a preset folder(s).

Gulp-inject

gulp-injectis a “stylesheet, JavaScript and webcomponent reference injection plugin for Gulp.” Its creators proclaim, "No more manual editing of your index.html!"

Linting Tools

JsHint 

JsHint is “a tool that helps to detect errors and potential problems in your JavaScript code,” and is probably the most popular code-quality tool. We use it for sanity checks of our JavaScript.

JSCS

JsHint used to support coding-convention checks as well, but the authors of the tool decided to offload that functionality to another tool—JSCS. We use it to enforce coding conventions across the team.

The combination of JsHint and JSCS is very important if your team wants to write consistent and clean code. And which team doesn’t?

Testing Tools

Jasmine vs Mocha

Jasmine and Mocha are the two most famous frameworks for writing unit tests in the Angular world. One would usually go with Mocha if they want more freedom for the assertion framework and mocking frameworks used. This is exactly why we chose to go for the combo Mocha + Chai + Sinon.

Chai

Mocha is usually used with Chai as an assertion framework. Chai supports notations for both test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). It also goes well with a fresh blueberry muffin.

Sinon

Sinon is the usual choice for a mocking/stubbing framework when one goes the Mocha + Chai way.

Karma

Karma is the de-facto standard for test runners. One can write and run tests with Mocha/Jasmine only; however, Karma is what provides the spawn browser support and the tons of integration tools with other frameworks.

Build-Time Optimization Tools

UglifyJS

UglifyJS is a “JavaScript parser, minifier, compressor or beautifier toolkit.” Each JavaScript application contains HTML, JS and CSS that should be processed in some way before shipping to production. We use Uglify to minimize the JavaScript and CSS because of its superior performance when it comes to file size. The fact that it was developed by a colleague of ours at Telerik, Mihai Bazon, is an extra benefit.

CSSO

CSSO is pretty much the same as UglifyJS but for CSS.

HTML Min

HTML min optimizes the HTML and is used together with templateCache.

TemplateCache

templateCache can be seen as the "hub" where Angular finds its view templates.

Show Us Yours

All the tools in this list help developers move their application from the idea to the production stage faster and, arguably, more smoothly. They’ve helped increase our team’s productivity and performance and we hope they do the same for you.

Let us know in the comments what AngularJS dev tools you’d add or remove from this list and whether you use some of the same ones!

Related Articles:

• The Future of JavaScript: 2016 and Beyond
• What to Expect in 2016 for Kendo UI with Angular 2 and More
• Speed Up Your AngularJS Development
• Will Angular 2 Be a Success? You Bet!
• All About AngularJS
• AngularJS Directives For The Rest Of Us

The Telerik UI for WinForms R1 2016 SP1 is here, featuring improvements to VirtualGrid and much more. Learn more about the latest upgrades.

With this blog I would like to introduce you to what’s new in the R1 2016 SP1 release of Telerik UI for WinForms. During the past month, we continued to develop further enhancements throughout the suite, and continued to improve and add to our newest control—RadVirtualGrid, which debuted in our previous release.

Here are some of the highlights in this release.

RadVirtualGrid

• AutoSizeColumnsMode—With this mode, the grid will size the columns in a way that automatically fills the available real estate, depending on the size of the content it contains.

• Save/Load layout with flexible serialization API—With the new serialization API, the control’s content can be serialized to a file/stream and then deserialized. This makes it possible to preserve user settings and restore them afterwards. In addition, the API allows for fine grain customization on what should be serialized, providing the opportunity to remove some of the default items being serialized and to add additional ones.
• Cell and row validation—The CellValidating and RowValidating events provide functionality to validate the cell/row contents. This functionality is also complimented by an error indicator displayed in the indent cell, used to notify the user of a validation error.

• Right to left support—The control now features RTL support, so it is now enabled for world-wide adoption.

• Design time improvements—The design time functionality of the control is also improved. With the new Smart Tag, the most common control options are exposed for easier setup.

RadDiagram

RadDiagram’s toolbox now features over 60 predefined shapes and connections. The Basic shapes have been complimented with new ones, and three new categories with shapes and connections have been added—Arrow, Flowchart and Container.

RadGroupBox

RadGroupBox's latest addition is support for mnemonics. Prefixing any of the characters in its header text with an ampersand will place an underscore underneath the character, and the prefixed character will play the role of a keyboard shortcut. When executed, this will select the first control in the group box container.

Go ahead and grab this update now—you can get the latest bits from your Telerik account. If you don’t have one, you can also download a trial here.

As always, your comments are most welcome. Feel free to leave a comment below, and you can also use our feedback portal to review and vote for current ideas or share new ones.

If you use Outlook's Web Access, you know it's convenient to access your email through a web client. With the new "Web Mail" for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX, web access to your mail is now easy. Read on for a quick demo and rundown of the features.

Two weeks ago we covered all the new things we have put up in our latest release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX through a webinar. If you missed that webinar don’t worry, we have you covered. You can watch a recap right here. One of the exciting things in this webinar for me was the new demo application that our team released. We call it "Web Mail" You can take a look at the demo app right now by going here and playing around a bit.

The Plot

You might be thinking “Why Web Mail?” Let me ask you a question: “Do you use Microsoft Outlook?” Dumb question—everybody does. But do you know you can access your Outlook mailbox over web? Microsoft has what is called as Outlook Web Access or OWA—the web access to outlook mailbox which is nothing but a web application.

I work from home. Sometimes I am on my work laptop where I have Outlook Windows client installed and sometimes I am on my personal laptop. On my personal laptop if I have to quickly get to any of my work mail, I just access it through OWA. OWA provides me access to Mail, Calendar, People and Tasks. Here is a screenshot of the OWA interface:

Fig 1: Microsoft Outlook Web Access

What better example than OWA to showcase the potential of our AJAX suite? So let’s take a tour of our Web Mail.

Web Mail Application

If you haven’t taken a look at the demo, this may be a good time to give it a spin and come back. When you access the app you will first land on Mail view. Here's a screenshot of the default look:

 
Fig 2: Web Mail Demo Application

Notice the  icon at the top left hand corner of the page. When clicked this icon will reveal an application-wide menu. The menu will provide links to other views, namely: Contacts, Calendar and Notes. As a user you will be able to easily navigate between any of the views.

Let's continue our tour of the application—just sit back and read on.

Slider Menu

For the web mail demo application, the application-wide navigation is based as a slider. The slider slides in and slides out from the left hand side of the page. You access the slider by clicking the Icon found before the page title. Here is a screenshot of how you access the slider menu:

Fig 3: Slider Menu in Web Mail Application

Let me tell you a secret: There is no RadSlider in our arsenal.

I was amazed when our team crafted this sexy slider with just a div. Yes, when the page first loads the slider div is hidden. When you click on the menu icon, the slider is made to appear with a set width. The menu items themselves are actually our RadMenu control with Vertical flow & LightWeight rendering. A super simple solution that gives a modern look and feel.

This solution is pretty simple indeed, but let us know in the comments below if you need such an app drawer control as part of the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX suite.

Mail Section

This is the first section of the application. As the name indicates, this section mimics your mailbox. Let me list all the salient portions of this section. We have:

1. Mailbox Folder listings
2. Action bar which provides email related actions
3. Email listing grid
4. Email preview area

 Visually, the screenshot below will show you the different areas of this section:

Fig 4: Areas in Mailbox Section

The folder listing is provided using our RadTreeView control. The action bar is made using RadNavigation control. The mail listing is based on our ever popular RadGrid. You can group your emails or sort based on any columns displayed. The preview pane is just a div where we output the mail content. You can change how you preview the email. On the action bar we have two icons which let you change the preview area location—below or to the side of the email listing grid.

Just to give you a quick glance of all the supported features in this section, I have created the following GIF:

Fig 5: Mail Section Features

Contacts Section

This is the second section in the demo application. As the name says—you can manage your contacts in this section. You can see all of your contacts or favorite contacts or friends or work contacts. One of the features available in this section is the ability to create a new folder to store your contacts. You can create new contacts and while creating save them in one of the folders available (i.e. All/Favorites/Friends/Work/etc.). Searching for contacts by using a search box is also possible. If you ever have a need to export your contacts list to Word/CSV/Excel/PDF there is an Export function available on the action bar.

From a controls perspective we have used RadTreeView, RadNavigation, RadListView and RadSearchBox. Here is a quick glance on what features are available in this section:

Fig 6: Contacts Section Features

Calendar Section

The third section in the web mail demo application is the Calendar. I don’t have to explain much here. We make use of our RadCalendar, RadTreeView, RadNavigation, RadScheduler and RadClientExportManager AJAX controls in this section. You can play around to take a look at different features this section provides.

Here is a screenshot of different things you can do in Calendar mode:

Fig 7: Calendar Section Features

Notes Section

This is the last section of the demo application. The Notes section allows you to create quick notes and save them in different categories. You can create different categories to group your notes. You search for notes using the search box. You can select one or more notes and delete them using the delete button available in action bar.

This uses RadTreeView, RadGrid, RadNavigation and RadSearchBox controls. I'll let you play around with Notes yourself to explore these features further.

Get Your Hands Dirty

If you are as excited as I am with this demo application and if you are eager to jump start one of your projects based on this application—you're in luck. We have the complete source code available for this demo application. You can find the download link within the demo application itself, or download it right here. In the demo, look for Download link in the title bar of the app or in the drawer menu:

This was our attempt to showcase how, using UI for ASP.NET AJAX, you can build Modern looking, LightWeight and Responsive Web applications without breaking a sweat. Many of the controls used in this demo now support LightWeight rendering and with this you get to lighten your page size.

We look forward to hearing what you all think of this demo application. If you have any comments for us, please do write them below. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

PS: If you like what you are seeing then stay tuned. We will soon be releasing this as a Visual Studio template for you to use in your projects.

The Kendo UI R1 2016 webinar was a huge event. The recording is now available on YouTube and we've selected the winners of all our great prizes.

Last week we officially took the wraps off of the first major release of Kendo UI for 2016. We had over 4,000 people register for the webinar. In case you missed it, let me give you the TL;DR.

• Documentation improvements (wave 1)
• New Dashboard Template
• Spreadsheet Enhancements
  • Client-Side importing
  • New formula option and improved functions
  • Enhanced export (client-side PDF)
  • Disable cells or ranges of cells
  • Auto-fill
  • A huge new client API
• Grid Enhancements
  • Excel-like filtering
  • Enhanced filtering
    • Filtering by null/empty values
• Disabling dates in Calendar Pickers
  • One of our most requested features of all time!
• Spreadsheet for UI for MVC
• New VS app templates
• Update on ASP.NET Core 1 and proposed support for TagHelpers

And lastly, HUGE news about the new version of Kendo UI. More on this in a moment.

Of course, we always record our webinars. Not everyone has the time to watch the entire thing, and webinar technology hasn't quite caught up to where we need it to be yet, meaning it's quite often that people have audio or video issues that prevent them from being able to watch the live event.

For that reason, you can catch last week's event now on YouTube in crystal clear HD. It's like a party for your eyeballs.

Big News About Kendo UI 2.0

Some of the biggest news from the webinar was about the new version of Kendo UI that we are building right now. Internally, we refer to it as "k2", but you can just call it "Kendo UI." It's going to be, wait for it, "Huuuuuuuuggge."

During the latter part of 2015, we noticed a dramatic shift in thinking regarding how to work with the DOM in a web application. For the first time, we saw a push to insert HTML into JavaScript, not the other way around.

This means that the traditional way of selecting and working with elements, the classical model of non-intrusive JavaScript, the common practice of attaching event listeners—all of this changes with the new models brought by React and Angular 2. Whether you agree with this or not, it's happening, and both of these frameworks are really marvelous feats of engineering.

That's why we're completing rebuilding Kendo UI from the ground up as a set of React and Angular 2 components.

But don't worry. The jQuery version of Kendo UI isn't going anywhere, and we've got a lot of features and new widgets planned for it. You only need to adopt React or Angular 2 if those frameworks are right for your team and your project.

Whether you choose jQuery, React or Angular 2, Kendo UI will be there to provide you with the most gorgeous UI for your most gorgeous application ideas.

More Coming Soon!

Soon. Very soon, you will see a new GitHub repo made public and you can track our progress as we recreate Kendo UI core as this new set of components.

We'll be firing up a new community very soon for "k2," and we'll want your ideas and feedback. Make sure you follow the official Kendo UI and Telerik Twitter accounts so you don't miss any details.

Prize Winners

Lastly, the reason you came to this blog post. We love to give away prizes, because we can. If you don't remember, we had three awesome giveaways this time: A 3D Printer, a set of Lego Mindstorms, and a Roku 4.

Mindstorms Winner

First off, we picked the best question asked during the Q&A to win the Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit. That prize goes to Jason Maronge. His question was on point. Here it is:

Q: Our company is just beginning to convert our Silverlight app to HTML. What we have decided to do is to continue the Angular 2 route with using kendo jquery widgets by creating them in the ngAfterViewInit method. Once you start releasing the new Angular 2 controls we will swap them out.

Does anyone at Telerik see anything wrong with this approach? Do you know of any issues we may run into?

A: Our suggestion would be to wait for the first previews of our Kendo UI Angular 2 components (see this blog for reference) and once they are available to start using them in your Angular 2 projects. Since they are going to be built as native Angular 2 components, they won't be compatible with the currently existing jQuery widgets, although the APIs can be similar.

Have in mind that present Kendo UI jQuery widgets and future Kendo UI Angular 2 components can co-exist in Angular 2 apps. Hence you should be able use them temporarily side-by-side and then gradually migrate to Kendo UI for Angular 2 once all replacement components are available.

Great question Jason!

3D Printer Winner

We decided to give away a printer to the person with the best feature suggestion, and that was Geoffrey Rodgers. Actually, several people made this suggestion, he was just the first to do so.

Suggestion: Aurelia is not as popular as Angular 2 and React (yet) but is it at least still a focus for the Kendo UI team? It seems like a great framework to support due to its plugin support that other frameworks may eventually incorporate (hopefully).

A: First off, let me say that there are some people on our team that are huge fans of Aurelia (cough Cody cough).

Aurelia is a remarkable application framework. While we would love to build widgets for all of the great libraries out there, we can only focus on the ones that have a large developer groundswell. Right now, that is React, and Angular 2 because of Angular 1.

In the meantime, there is a great open source project for using Kendo UI widgets within Aurelia that we highly suggest you check out. Great stuff from some very talented developers out there.

Roku 4

Lastly, we're giving a Roku 4 to a random person. All you had to do to be eligible to win this prize was to register for the webinar. Our lucky winner is Ron Porteous.



If you were one of our lucky winners, we've got your email address and we'll be in touch soon.

It's Gonna Be Huge

This is a very exciting time for Kendo UI. We reboot our web product about every four ears, and 2016 is that year for Kendo UI.

Congratulations to all of our winners, and thank you for making Kendo UI the best UI framework in the world. It is nothing without the developers who use it to bring their ideas to life.

The R1 2016 SP1 release for UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight are out and available for download, bringing new features and fixes.

Telerik UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight R1 2016 SP1 releases are now here and ready for you to download. The full release history can be found in the detailed lists for WPF and Silverlight. Below we highlight the most important additions:

Docking

• Provided a way to access the MainWindow's (or any other Window's) resources in the generated ToolWindow instances
• Added ToolWindowCreated, PaneGroupCreated and SplitContainerCreated events that are raised when the control's DefaultGeneratedItemsFactory creates elements at runtime
• Added override for the DockingPanesFactory's CreatePaneForItem() that accepts the RadDocking instance

GridView

• Optimized GridViewRow/Cell automation API—this change should improve general performance on touch-enabled devices, or other UI Automation environments

PanelBar

• Added ExpanderStyle property of the RadPanelbarItem for controlling the Style of the Expander path

PDF Viewer

• Improved memory usage when rendering big images
• Decreased memory usage when rendering text and graphics

RibbonView

• RibbonWindow buttons are not consistent with RadWindow in Windows8Touch theme

RichTextBox

• RTF format provider: Improved compatibility with WordPad and RichTextBox when exporting transparent colors

Spreadsheet

• Improved the logic for searching formulas in Insert Function dialog

TreeList

• Improved vertical scrolling performance
• Optimized GridViewRow/Cell automation API—this change should improve general performance on touch-enabled devices, or other UI Automation environments

Window

• Added HostCreated event to RadWindow, which is raised after the WindowHost creation

You can download the bits for WPF and Silverlight and give them a spin. Do not forget about our WPF demos and Silverlight demos. 

If you're curious about what's coming next, be sure to take a look at our roadmap for R2. Last but not least, please feel free to share your comments on our Ideas & Feedback portal.

The Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX R1 2016 SP1 release is live, and introduces important changes in the appearance of the ASP.NET AJAX controls. They are now more responsive and flexible for customization.

Font Removal From Almost All Skins

(font, font-size, font-family, font-weight, font-icon, font-style)

We've removed the built-in font settings of the controls and changed their metrics so they inherit their container/page font settings and look better on the screens of today's devices (bigger fonts, padding and so on). And that's not all—we've improved their elasticity and made them more consistent.

These improvements are part of an ongoing initiative to improve the appearance of all Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls. If you ever experience any trouble with these changes, we'll gladly help you quickly solve them.

Here is a simple example showing how you can set the font size of the page, which will automatically be applied to the controls on it:

You can see our help article on fonts for more information. Soon we'll also publish a blog post focusing specifically on this new improvement with more details, screenshots and examples.

Other Improvements That Directly Benefit You

• Stability—a lot of bugs have been fixed, and you can find them in the Release Notes
• Device Detection Framework—the list of supported devices and browsers has been expanded and updated
• RadSpreadsheet has been updated:
  • The full set of skins is now available and supported
  • Client import from XLSX has been provided
• The exportation of DOCX and RTF in RadEditor now supports HTML images with relative URLs
• The "Primary buttons" functionality is now offered by RadFormDecorator

Upgrade Instructions and Helper Tools

You can also meet the new Telerik API Analyzer Tool. It could help you identify all problematic areas in the C# code which you might face during the upgrade process. You can check out this useful blog post for more information on how to upgrade to the latest version in a few easy steps.

Roadmap

If you're curious to learn what major stuff is planned for R2'16, take a look at our planned roadmap. You can also go back and check out our blog post on the topic, where we describe the changes in more detail.

Feedback

Your opinion is always valuable to us. Don't hesitate to share it in the comments below.

Have you ever dreamed of having the slick and flexible client-side performance in a traditional server-side data bound app? Now we make it a reality.

The R1 2016 release of the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX suite adds an amazing improvement to the RadClientDataSource control.

Now you can hook it up directly to any server-side data source control and it will retrieve data and perform all necessary operations as if the control is using client-side databinding, significantly boosting performance and providing smooth user experience. And all this with just a few easy steps.

Read more below to find how to achieve this.

New Key Feature

The RadClientDataSource has been our main component serving as a provider for client-side capabilities to many of our controls, supporting binding to all kinds of web services. Now we further extend this feature by adding an option to extract data directly from a server-side data source control. No matter if you are using SqlDataSource, EntityDataSource or any other type—the RadClientDataSource can easily bind to any of them and retrieve data seamlessly.

It is a two way integration so performing an operation through the RadClientDataSource will also be immediately reflected on the server as well.

The Setup

The configuration is pretty straightforward and easy. All settings of the new feature are conveniently placed in a new group called DataSourceControlSettings, which contains the following properties:

• DataSourceID—sets or gets the ID of the server-side DataSource control from which the ClientDataSource will retrieve data
• DataKeyNames—holds the comma-separated values of the field name used in CRUD operations
• DataFields—holds comma-separated values of the data field names that would be retrieved from the datasource
• AllowAutomaticUpdates, AllowAutomaticInserts, AllowAutomaticDeletes—serve to enable CRUD operations in the DataSource control
• DataMember—specifies the name of the view of the DataSource that will be used when binding

Some of the already existing properties (such as EnableServerFiltering, EnableServerPaging, EnableServersorting) are also applicable in this case. Their function is the same as before—specify whether the particular operation should be performed on the client on entirely on the server.

Behind the Scenes

The secret of the client-side performance capabilities lies within an internal callback request to the server, which returns only the necessary portion of data serialized as JSON back to the client. This allows the standard databinding mechanism of the RadClienDataSource to pick up from there and process the data as necessary, as if it was returned from a call to web service.

If you have enabled server-side operations the control will also send the necessary parameters for paging, filtering or sorting. This will be then passed to the server-side data source control to perform the query to the database. All this happening seamlessly while the user can continue to work with the application.

Unlock Further Optimizations

We believe this new key feature of RadClientDataSource can unlock even more options for optimizations in a classic server-side data bound application by utilizing capabilities only available to a client-side app until now. The simple and easy switch to RadClientDataSource will allow your users to feel the difference right away and enjoy working without unnecessary postbacks.

If this sounds exciting, wait to see what we are going to bring in the upcoming service pack. Along with things like an improved appearance and responsiveness, there'll be full support for CRUD batch operations: any data source, any app—fully client-side! Now, how cool is that?

Eager to try out the latest features? Our demos await you: ClientDataSource—Binding to DataSource Controls. Additional information can also be found in this help topic.

Let us know how you find the new feature of RadClientDataSource in the comments section below.

Learn about the latest enhancements you can enjoy in the appearance and dimensions of the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX controls.

Rich-featured functionality and stability are two essential ingredients when it comes to Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX controls development. But when it comes down to it, what attracts users to your application and keeps them coming back is the first impression—the love at first sight.

Visual elements, color scheme, dimension dependencies and more provide a consistent and expressive visual language that guide the user through the layout into the depths of your project. We give the star role to the user in terms of how we manage new technologies and data-driven infrastructures, and aim to create user-centered designed controls.

By using a consistent set of elements and effects, your users will naturally navigate to the areas you want them to, and will complete their goals faster. 

Visual Consistency

Your layout is a complete and synchronized micro-system, and you should carefully choose the interaction method you'll use. For example, one button could be bigger than the others or have a different color when used for a primary action. If it's not intentional, however, inconsistency will disturb and confuse the consumer.

The migration from Classic to Lightweight render mode of Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls causes some slight visual differences. Classic controls use image sprites for borders with rounded corners, gradients, icons etc., while Lightweight controls take advantage of CSS.

SASS is used for Style Sheet authoring of ASP.NET AJAX themes. To avoid an endless set of colors and inconsistency in theme palettes, skin variables are very precisely reduced or reused with CSS manipulations. Although the improvements result in several visual modifications, the latest generated skins are easier to support and customize with CSS or using the Telerik Theme Builder for ASP.NET AJAX. If you prefer the Classic look, changes can easily be overridden with a CSS rule.

Dimension Improvements

With the introduction of the Lightweight render mode, the performance and flexibility of our ASP.NET AJAX controls increased. Inspired by the most popular frameworks and leading design principles, during the last few releases we followed modern trends and good UI practices, enlarging the dimensions of Telerik AJAX controls.

All dimensions are defined in the base CSS files of each control. Skin specific files provide the visual styles only as color, background-color and border-color. Therefore, in various skins all controls have equal measurements and differ only in colors and shades.

Since the R1 2016 SP1 release we have improved the metrics of AJAX form controls: RadButton, RadInput, RadComboBox and RadDropDownList, etc. The ASP.NET AJAX skin palette is divided into three main categories: Default or Classic skins, Bootstrap skin and the new Material skin. In each of the above there are established interrelated connections between width, height, font size (14px), line height (20px), paddings and borders. A dimension-orientated scheme based on line height and font size ratio is created—1.428571429 (20/14)—that keeps the main proportions of controls consistent with each other, used individually, combined in a complex data form or integrated in composite controls like RadToolbar. By changing just the font size, the layout of the controls can easily be adjusted to fulfill various needs.

The default width of form controls is set to 12em, which can easily be overridden by a CSS rule. The only exception is RadButton and RadFormDecorator Button—their min-width is defined as 64px, which improves the behavior of call-to-action buttons with short content like “OK” and “Save.”

Default Skins

Default skins are all our well-known classic skins, supported through the years: Black, Default, Silk, Glow, all Metro skins, all Office skins, etc. The default height of the controls it set to 30px for a base font size of 14px.

Bootstrap Skin

All metrics in Bootstrap skin are based on the Bootstrap framework requirements and specifications. Our main goal is to be consistent, not only in the UI for ASP.NET AJAX controls environment, but also synchronized with Bootstrap components, used together on one page, in one project. Default height of form controls is set to 34px, when the base font size is set to 14px.

Material Skin

Material design challenged the ASP.NET AJAX team to create a skin identical to Google's visual language and principles. The final result is a skin based on typography, grid, space, scale and color scheme that adheres to Material design guidelines. All form controls are set to a 36px height for a base font size of 14px.

Font Icons

The use of font icons and SVG images has increased in popularity over the last few years. One of the greatest benefits of using font icons is the ability to scale them up and down with ease. However, if we would like to have crisp, sharp images, we need to deal with some technical limitations—especially in small sizes.

Although font icons consist of vector graphics, we should keep in mind that each icon is designed in a fixed pixel grid. A pixel grid is the minimum-scaled canvas in which our icon would look pixel-perfect. Every detail of the icon should be aligned to that grid system. Therefore, the final image-icon will have the best quality when its size equals the base pixel grid size or multiplies it.

If you'd like to use icons with a font size of 16px, 32px or 48px, you should use a font icon design in a base grid canvas scalable to 16x16. If you'd like to use an icon in 14px, 28px or 42px size, the base canvas should be 14x14, etc. So, when one uses a font with a pixel grid base of 16px and sets the font size to 17px, the browser is going to antialiase the semi-transparent pixels and render a blurred image. Have in mind that the bigger the font icon size is, the better quality the image will be.



Lightweight render mode of Telerik AJAX Controls embedded a Telerik font icon for better optimized performance. It is designed in a 16px grid base, so for best image quality it should be used in a 16-scalable size. In the near future, it will be very easy to change the font size of all embedded icons with a CSS rule.

The only exception is Material skin. It uses a Material Icons font, depicted by Google to correspond to the Material design concept and approach. It is optimized for a 24px base, although Google recommends using it in 18px, 24px, 36px and 48px sizes. The font is included in Telerik.Web.UI assembly and is embedded on the page when the Material skin is in use. As Google updates the Material font icon, we are going to update it regularly as well.

What’s Next

Our main goal is to have all ASP.NET AJAX Controls follow unified measurement guidelines, and adhere to a space system that can easily be customized with CSS and is scalable with font-size settings. We have already started to improve navigation controls dimensions: RadMenu, RadNavigation, RadTabstrip and RadToolbar. Next stop are data management controls: RadGrid, RadTreeList, etc.

We want to hear your feedback—let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Wondering what to expect at Microsoft Build 2016? We share some updates and our predictions, and of course we'll be there too—we'll have many demos to show and parties to attend.

Microsoft /build is just a week away and we are still to see the agenda. The show promises nevertheless to be quite exciting, not only in terms of announcements, but in connecting with fellow developers.

Parties, Connections and Mingling

Build has always been great at connecting attendees over drinks, and this year is no different. We'll be attending all of these, but we will have two special events which deserve your attention—feel free to look us up—we'll be the cool guys with the Telerik t-shirts. Here is our party agenda:

Telerik Party—Free Drinks

March 29th, 7:30-10pm at Thirsty Bear Brewing Company
661 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94105 (map, add to calendar)

If you are heading to Build 2016, make sure to arrive a day early and join us for a few drinks, on us, just for being awesome. Several Telerik heroes will be there: @JohnBristowe, @Samidip, @NikiAtanasov, @EdCharbeneau and yours truly.

Telerik in the Mixology VII Attendee Party

March 31th, 7:30-11pm at Delarosa
37 Yerba Buena Ln, San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

As is tradition, the Visual Studio Partner Program team will be organizing this year's Mixology party, and it will be a blast. The setup this year is different (but better) than what we've seen in the past and Telerik will be sponsoring one of the happenings during Mixology. Find us—look for the Kendoka—we just may have some cool swag to give to you!

Telerik Session at /build

Well, /build is a Microsoft show where mostly Microsoft "blue badges" present. We are proud to have been invited to participate in a few sessions—we'd love to see you. Look out for John Bristowe's (@jbristowe) session below:

NativeScript and Visual Studio Code: Together at Last
Yes, you heard it here, folks. You can now write NativeScript-based apps in Visual Studio Code—all through the power of Visual Studio Code's extensibility model. In this session, you'll discover how to build native mobile apps with NativeScript using Visual Studio Code. You'll also learn how the extensibility model works in Visual Studio Code and how you can write an extension yourself!

The Future of Xamarin

A month ago Microsoft acquired Xamarin and promised to share more details as to the Xamarin future during Build and Evolve. Today I'm ready to bet that:

1. Microsoft will announce its intentions to merge the UWP and Xamarin codebases into a unified framework for targeting Windows 10 (desktop and mobile), Android, iOS, Xbox, IoT, etc. devices with a single C# codebase

2. Xamarin tooling will become free and will be included in Visual Studio

If you are up for this bet, I'll be at the Telerik Party the day before (see above)—feel free to stop by and chat. Or look me up at the Telerik booth—we'll be happy to show you our UI for Xamarin suite and to discuss all announcements.

UWP, HoloLens, Xbox

The holographic computing age is here, yet we are still to see what HoloLens is capable of. It started shipping in early 2016 and I suspect that Microsoft has a great demo up its sleeve for /build. Technology-wise, I think we'll see an uber-impressive HoloLens app (game?!) built with UWP, running on Xbox and controlled via Cortana.

If you need UWP UI today, stop by the Telerik booth for a UI for UWP demo.

SQL Server Running on Linux

By now it should be obvious that Microsoft is keeping its promise in making its products and new innovations accessible to a broader set of users. Earlier this month Scott Guthrie announced Microsoft's plans to bring SQL Server to Linux. A private preview is out today, but probably we'll see one or two demos of SQL Server running on Linux during the keynote (likely bundled together with Visual Studio Code and .NET Core).

Office 365 Development With Kendo UI

Did you know that if you are part of the Office 365 Developer Program you get Kendo UI for free? Telerik is the official UI partner for Office 365 development and we have a cool demo to show you—just look our booth up and ask for it. We even plan on a few Channel9 videos on the topic shortly after /build.

UI for NativeScript

Last year we announced the preview of UI for NativeScript—a suite of rich and native UI components that add advanced features on top of the default UI components that are shipped with the NativeScript framework. We are expanding the suite with new components and new functionality and we are ready to show you what we are up to if you are at /build.

NativeScript for Visual Studio Code

The NativeScript extension for Visual Studio Code is a great way to accelerate your NativeScript development workflow. With IntelliSense, interactive debugging, conditional breakpoints and device emulation integration, the NativeScript extension for Visual Studio Code provides the most feature complete environment for NativeScript Development. Perhaps the best feature of all, it's free!

If you are into VS code, make sure to go to @JohnBristowe's session on "NativeScript and Visual Studio Code: Together at Last (see above).

.NET Developer News

We know something you don't! Yes, we know what .NET developers plan to do with UWP and what platform their next web app will be on. We will share the news during /build, so make sure to stop by the Telerik booth for the nitty gritty.

See you at /build!

The excitement is mounting as the /build 2016 festivities get underway today. We had a blast last night as hundreds of developers joined us for a fantastic evening at the ThirstyBear Telerik Party at Build 2016.

We have some fantastic giveaways for those attending the conference, but we were thinking—how can we bring the excitement of /build 2016 to those viewing online? By extending our /build 2016 giveaways to those watching the Keynote!

In the spirit of our /build 2016 t-shirt of “Making .NET Great Again”, we will be giving away 500 licenses of Telerik UI for Xamarin (Cross-Platform SKU valued at $799) to developers both at /build and around the world watching the keynote online.

Here is how to enter to win one of 500 free licenses:

• Be one of the first 500 people to complete this short questionnaire
• The winners will be notified via email on Wednesday, April 6th, via the email address used to fill out the survey
• Brownie points to those who tweet with the following hashtags: #build2016 #bldwin

The Telerik team is honored to be the leading provider of UI for the Microsoft Ecosystem for 12 years running. As we celebrate the union of Xamarin and Microsoft, we look forward to continuing to bring you the best tools for all your development needs.

Cheers,

Sasha, VP, Product Marketing

Rather than clutter this blog post with all the legal terms, you can see them all here.

There were clearly some great surprises in the keynote yesterday, causing twitosphere reactions. My favorite came from @brianleroux’s status on bash: https://twitter.com/brianleroux/status/715210149372125184.

We got a little more scientific and ran a few Twitter polls. The first results of our Twitter polls on /build news are in.

Twitter poll results: 60% of /build keynote watchers will move to Windows 10 soon because of Bash.

Granted, this is a limited sample, so we are re-posting these twitter polls for another 24 hours. We’ll combine all the results and re-post the final results, so head over to the polls to weigh-in:

https://twitter.com/Telerik/status/715559650733719552

https://twitter.com/Telerik/status/715560015856320514

BTW, here is a great recap of /build news from day one from Sam Basu over at Telerik Developer Network. Also, we are bringing the excitement of /build 2016 expo floor giveaway with 500 Telerik UI for Xamarin Licenses to all of you at home.

Sasha