The latest release of our Reporting and Report Server products is out, delivering numerous stability enhancements, UX improvements, and security fixes.

The R2 2016 SP1 release of Telerik Reporting and Telerik Report Server is here. Let's dive into the latest upgrades, including to item templates, report designers, Report Server security and more.

Item Templates

Item templates have been improved to easily set up the report viewer's connection to Telerik Reporting REST service or Report Server instances.

Report Designers

The report designers now allow the user to edit expressions in combo boxes inline. You will also find that working with Drilldown actions is now easier due to multiple fixes in their user interface.

The Standalone Report Designer now remembers your Report Server connection password, last used report category, and whether you prefer to work with reports on your local computer or on a Report Server based on your recently used reports history.

Reporting Engine

Text justification now works seamlessly with report paging.

Report Server

Security has been improved greatly in SP1 due to numerous fixes affecting permissions when accessing the Report Server Web API. The Standalone Report Designer also received updates to complement these changes.

You can find detailed information on all of the included improvements in the Release Notes page.

We will be glad to receive your feedback and new requests on our Feedback portal, or you can feel free to leave a comment below. With your help, we're working hard to continue making our solutions the best for your reports.

Official ASP.NET Core 1.0 Support, new components, styles and much more are on the way in our UI for ASP.NET MVC roadmap for R3 2016.

The world is changing, and as pioneers we closely follow the modern trends in web development. The goal is clear, and it is to be among the first vendors to offer:

Official ASP.NET Core 1.0 (MVC) Support

Since the release date for ASP.NET Core 1.0.0 is rapidly approaching at the end of the month (Jun 27), we are working hard to introduce full support for it shortly after it launches. This means that all available widgets will work properly on the new framework along with the recently introduced Tag Helpers.

You can follow the progress of ASP.NET Core 1.0 development here. Right now our MVC suite provides support for the second release candidate of ASP.NET Core 1.0, and we'll ensure that it is fully compatible with the RTM release.

What More to Expect in R3'16

New Confirm, Prompt and Alert Component

The new popups will allow you to achieve a sleek and consistent look and feel across browsers and devices. You'll be able to customize their appearance to match your application's appearance, and easily transfer content between the page and the dialog's content.

New Media Player Component

The media component will be capable of playing files of any HTML5-supported audio and video format, including WebM, Ogg, MP4 and WAVE. It will also support YouTube videos.

AutoComplete, ComboBox, DropDownList and MultiSelect Improvements

Some great improvements will be introduced to the dropdown widgets:

• The components will feature a clear "X" button similar to the one offered by <input type="search" />
• Footer and "No data" templates
• “AutoWidth” configuration option similar to what the RadCombobox for ASP.NET AJAX exposes

Grid

Thanks to the out-of-the box integration with the RadSpreadProcessing library, the grid is going to offer export to CSV/XLSX formats.

Editor

Our goal is to significantly improve the HTML editor and make it as useful as its AJAX counterpart RadEditor. Among the nice additions which you can expect are:

• Immutable containers that will allow you to define non editable areas in the content area. This is especially useful in CMS systems where you might want to insert embedded Twitter messages.
• Import from RTF and DOCX—this is highly demanded feature by the community
• Export to RTF, DOCX and PDF—again highly anticipated functionality, which is a must have for an HTML editor
• Table Wizard along with table, column and row resizing—great functionality for table management that will enable the end users to easier deal with table elements in the content area

Gantt

More control is granted to the developers to precisely enable or disable editing options like: create, update (reorder, resize, move, editors), destroy, move, resize, reorder, dependencyCreate and dependencyDestroy. You'll also benefit from the ability to specify a range or selected date in the Timeline view.

Scheduler

The scheduling component will allow you to group its appointments by Date and Resource.

Spreadsheet

Expect new improved layout and styling of the validation dialog. You can see the new enhanced design and UX here. In addition, the spreadsheet will introduce support for custom editors as well as user-defined names.

Have Feedback?

You just learned about the planned highlights for the R3 release. If you have comments, suggestions or feature requests, the right places to share them are the comments section below and the Feedback portal. Your feedback is always highly appreciated!

In this service release we have focused our efforts mostly on improving the product's stability. In addition, we have also worked on making the recently introduced RadCardView even better and faster. A full list of the changes can be found in our release notes.

Section Columns in RadRichTextEditor

In this release, we have added a really useful feature to RadRichTextEditor, which allows you to separate the text in a section into multiple columns. The columns allow for both equal column width or a fixed width of each column, thus allowing you to create the layout that best fits your scenario.

Exporting to Stream

Users contacted us with a request to export the controls contents into a stream, so they can further manipulate it as they see fit. To accommodate this request, we have introduced overloads to the export methods for the following providers: PivotGridSpreadExport, PivotGridPdfExport, TreeViewSpreadExport, ListViewSpreadExport, PropertyGridSpreadExport, GridViewSpreadExport and GridViewPdfExport.

The overload accepts a stream, where the output will be written to and returns the stream with the data in it.

RadPdfViewer

In RadPdfViewer, we have improved our printing mechanism and centered the document to the printed page. 

Additionally, we have also improved the way links work in single page view mode. Now when a link is clicked you are navigated to the page the link points to, again in single page mode.

Anouncement: RadRichTextBox Will Be Removed in R3 2016

If you are still using RadRichTextBox, I would like to once again remind you to switch to the improved editor control—RadRichTextEditor, as RadRichTextBox will be removed from our code base soon.

The latest bits of Telerik UI for WinForms are already available in your account. If you don’t have one, you can try it out with a free trial.

As always, feel free to use our Feedback portal to share your ideas and/or vote for existing ones.

Learn what's coming in the latest release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX. New components and themes, plus improved tools to help you design beautiful apps.

Curious to learn what's cooking for the third major release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX for 2016? Then check out the information below, which will reveal two new components along with some of the planned improvements in the existing tools.

New CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls

The fresh CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList components will help you to easily build single or multi-selection lists for sign up forms, surveys and many more scenarios. They'll offer nice design through the 21 available themes, Lightweight rendering, rich client and server-side API, databinding and accessibility capabilities.


Figure 1: The useful CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList tools will be a nice addition to the RadButton group of form controls

New Silk and Glow Base Themes in the ThemeBuilder

The increased usage of the Lightweight rendering made the ThemeBuilder the preferred choice for every front-end developer and designer who wants to create and/or modify the skins meant for the Lightweight rendering of the controls. In addition, the appearance of the UI components is important for everybody, so we decided to add two additional base skins to the currently available ones: Silk and Glow.

The next theme to be added is the Metro Touch one, but if you want to see another one added let us know in the feedback portal or the comments section below. You can also submit your vote for a new skin.

Figure 2: Choose one of the provided base skins as a base to create your own theme suitable for your project design and requirements

Chart (HTML 5)

Two new Bullet Chart and Vertical Box Plot types will be added to the portfolio of RadHtmlChart.

The bullet chart is variation of a bar chart. You can use it as a replacement for dashboard gauges and meters.

The vertical box plot is similar to the standard box plot. It is useful for comparing distributions between different sets of numerical data.

Figure 3: A Vertical Box Plot chart at a glance

Gantt

• You will be granted precise control (enable or disable) over options like: create, update (reorder, resize, move, editors), destroy, move, resize, reorder, dependencyCreate and dependencyDestroy
• You will be able to specify a range or selected date in the Timeline view of the control

Spreadsheet

• Hyperlink support for cell contents
• Multi-line editing
• The ability to show/hide the sheet grid lines, which is very nice for printing and exporting scenarios

Stay tuned for the official R3 2016 release to land with these features in mid-September.

Of course, the above features are only part of everything that we do behind the scenes. We continue to reduce the amount of open bugs and help with useful suggestions and code examples in the Code Libraries, Forums and last but not least the Feedback Portal.

The creation of useful how-to resources is our top goal for the whole year too, so if you have nice ideas for interesting how-to resources do not hesitate to share them. Your feedback, suggestions, features requests and votes in the feedback portal are very important for us and we do appreciate them greatly.

One of the latest benefits for you in UI for ASP.NET AJAX is the modernized Create New Project Wizard for Visual Studio. The redesigned wizard is part of the Visual Studio Extensions for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX, and aims to help you create and configure new web projects with the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX components even faster, easier and more reliably.

The wizard's UI and UX are simplified, easy to use and now feature only the really needed settings to start a new project, i.e. switchers for the preferred language (C# or VB.NET) and the project types (App or Site), the version number as well as the available project templates (Blank, Responsive and Outlook-inspired):

The Finish button will create a new project based on your choices. If you need to go to the more advanced options such as used Assemblies, Skins and Web Settings, you can locate them in the Project Configuration Wizard through the Telerik -> UI for ASP.NET AJAX -> Configure Project menu:

The first wizard step allows you to select which assemblies are to be referenced by your project:

The second step allows you to choose the desired theme:

The third wizard step applies to web setting such as CDN, project Ajaxification, jQuery usage and MaxRequestLength:

And that's not all, you can also insert predefined custom scenarios for some of the most popular components in the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX suite through the wizard:

This is shown in more detail below:

We hope that you'll find the changes useful, and enjoy working with the refreshed VS Create New Project and Configure Project wizards that we've developed for UI for ASP.NET AJAX. The next suite that will get a revamped New Create Project and Project Configuration Wizards will be UI for ASP.NET MVC.

We'd like to hear your feedback and ideas for improvements in the comments section below. You can also post your ideas for new components, features and bug reports in our Feedback portal.

After nearly two years in the making, .NET Core 1.0 is here! Read on to find out what this announcement means for developers and how we're working to support it.

Microsoft has just shipped the RTM of .NET Core 1.0, which represents a significant milestone in the evolution of .NET.

Scott Guthrie announced the open-sourcing of the .NET Core runtime and framework back in November 2014. Approximately 19 months later, .NET developers now have a new runtime and set of libraries available to them that are open source and supported across Windows, OS X and variants of Linux. Richard Lander describes the motivation for .NET Core in his announcement blog post, stating:

"About two years ago, we started receiving requests from some ASP.NET customers for '.NET on Linux.' Around the same time, we were talking to the Windows Server Team about Windows Nano, their future, much smaller server product. As a result, we started a new .NET project, which we codenamed 'Project K,' to target these new platforms. We changed the name, shape and experience of the product a few times along the way, at every turn trying to make it better and applicable to more scenarios and a broader base of developers. It's great to see this project finally available as .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0."

The RTM release includes the following items:

• .NET Core 1.0
• ASP.NET Core 1.0 (previously known as ASP.NET 5)
• Entity Framework Core 1.0

As is the Microsoft tradition, a bunch of teams working on related products shipped updates to coincide with today's release:

• Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 (includes latest tools for Cordova, UWP and Xamarin)
• Updated documentation
• NuGet 3.5 Beta 2 and 2.12 RTM
• Docker Tools for Visual Studio 2015—Preview

What is .NET Core?

In this video, Richard Lander does a great job of providing an overview of .NET Core—what it is, how it works and why you should care about it:

Representing a significant change from the .NET Framework you've worked with previously, .NET Core was designed to address the challenges expressed by developers when building .NET applications. For a detailed summary of the historical context behind .NET Core, I would recommend reading this article by Immo Landwerth, "Introducing .NET Core."

The development platform includes workloads for targeting Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and ASP.NET Core—both are underpinned by a set of foundational libraries called CoreFX:

Currently, .NET Core 1.0 ships with the ASP.NET Core app model, which provides a new implementation of ASP.NET MVC. It does not include ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET AJAX.

These libraries contain common building blocks used across applications, including classes for collections, file system access, console I/O, XML processing and more. Additionally, .NET Core includes the ability to build native executables that operate across Windows, OS X, and Linux.

What .NET Core Means to Our Customers

So, where does this leave us for customers wanting to use .NET Core 1.0 with Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC?

Recently, we added support for ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 in the latest release of Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC. However, the changes introduced in .NET Core 1.0 means that we'll have to update it to ensure compatibility. At the time of blog post, there are a few breaking changes that remain open for ASP.NET Core that we're following closely.

Our plan is to deliver Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC R2 2016 SP2 with official support for ASP.NET Core 1.0.0 RTM by mid-July 2016. We also plan to launch the latest internal build of UI for ASP.NET MVC this week, which you can test under ASP.NET Core. Feel free to share any feedback on the latest build.

As a reminder, there's a lot to look forward to in the next release. For example, we included a set of tag helpers for widgets like the NumericTextBox, Button, Window, DatePicker and TimePicker. Tag Helpers provide an HTML-like development experience for server-side code, all while preserving tooling features like IntelliSense.

Here's an example using the DateTimePicker:

By way of comparison, here's the same control using our HTML Helpers within a Razor view:

Both code snippets will create a date-time picker widget on the page:

Making Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC available as a service is done through the ConfigureServices() method of the startup class. This method is used to load all of the services you may wish to use through ASP.NET Core via dependency injection (DI):

The final step is to register the Tag Helpers for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC via _ViewImports.cshtml:

We have detailed instructions on how to use these Tag Helpers in our documentation.

Wrapping Up

It's an incredibly exciting time to be a .NET developer. The release of .NET Core 1.0 brings with it a whole bunch of changes that will transform the way we build cross-platform apps for web, mobile and desktop.

Starting now, you can build full production applications that target .NET Core 1.0, ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0. It is our commitment to have an update out by mid-July so you can also start using it. In the meantime, I'd encourage you to check out a few of the following resources, which will help you get ready to use .NET Core 1.0:

• Article: .NET CLI Decoded
• Documentation: Tag Helpers in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC
• GitHub: Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC Core Sample App
• GitHub: Telerik UI for ASP.NET Core 1.0 MVC demos
• Post: Get Official ASP.NET Core 1.0 Support in Telerik ASP.NET MVC
• Whitepaper: ASP.NET Core MVC Changes Every Developer Should Know

We announce our official support for the new ASP.NET Core framework (MVC 6), and answer some of the most frequently asked questions by our community.

ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM is now live and developers around the globe are highly excited to give it a spin. Now that it's released, more and more developers are about to start new or to migrate existing apps onto it. This means the need for beautiful and high quality UI components that run on the new Microsoft framework is increasingly vital.

As a result, the inevitable question arises:

When will Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX officially support it?

I'm proud to share that as of today the R2 2016 SP2 release of Telerik UI for ASPNET MVC fully supports ASPNET Core 1.0 RTM!

All included components are fully compliant with ASP.NET Core (MVC 6) and will allow you to build apps with beautiful and accessible UI that runs on the supported three operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Is there a new name for the Kendo.Mvc assembly for ASP.NET Core?

Yes, that's right, the name of the new assembly is Telerik.UI.for.AspNet.Core and it clearly highlights the framework targeted by the suite. The new name replaces the old Kendo.Mvc.dll one.

What’s new in the Kendo UI MVC wrappers for ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM?

That's a good question!

• Tag Helpers—we are following the ASP.NET Core specification and we have included Tag Helpers for some of the popular components: NumericTextBox, Button, Window, DatePicker and TimePicker. We plan to add more tag helpers in the next releases, but it will be awesome if you share feedback on exactly which components you'd like to define and configure through Tag Helpers.
• New VS template—You can now use the new Telerik template to quickly setup and create a project for ASP.NET Core.
• GitHub Demo app—The demo app is now obsolete and will be replaced by a brand new demo app for ASP.NET Core in the R3'16 release.

Will the temporary NuGet.org feed be updated?

The idea of the NuGet feed was to provide a fast way to obtain all latest releases of our MVC bundle built against the beta and release candidates of ASP.NET Core. Since NuGet is suitable for open source resources, and we also offer a private Telerik feed for distributing NuGet packets, we won't distribute any more MVC Core related installations.

From now on we recommend using the Telerik private feed for the UI for ASP.NET MVC product. You can access it via https://nuget.telerik.com/nuget by referencing this URL as a new package source inside of a Visual Studio project. To gain access to the server you have to provide your Telerik account credentials:

Figure 1.Configuring Telerik NuGet feed in Visual Studio -> Tools -> NuGet Package Manager -> Manage NuGet Packages for Solution...

Figure 2. Telerik Private NuGet feed along with the Telerik.UI.for.AspNet.Core package

Is there a new Visual Studio template for building ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM apps with Kendo UI MVC wrappers?

Yes, you can easily get started with the new Telerik ASP.NET Core project through the create a new project wizard of Visual Studio: File -> New -> Project ... -> Installed -> Templates -> Telerik Web -> Telerik C# ASP.NET Core MVC Application. The template is based on the default ASP.NET Core one and features two of our popular Telerik MVC navigation components Menu and TabStrip:

Figure 3. Try the new Telerik Template for ASP.NET Core

Are there any alternative ways to obtain the new R2'16 SP2 release?

You can always log into your Telerik.com accounts, go to the Downloads section and download the preferred installation type.

Important Resources

• Product Page: Official Telerik ASP.NET Core (MVC6) page
• Documentation: Get Started with UI for ASP.NET MVC Core
• Documentation: Tag Helpers in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC Core
• Blog Post: Get Official ASP.NET Core 1.0 Support in Telerik ASP.NET MVC
• Blog Post 2: The New .NET Core 1.0 Is Here
• Whitepaper: ASP.NET Core MVC Changes Every Developer Should Know
• Webinar Video: Kendo UI Wrappers for ASP.NET MVC Core 1.0
• Release Notes: R2 2016 SP2

Improved performance, Precision, Private Fonts, Continuous Paper, Can Shrink and Viewers Events—check out the latest features in Reporting R3 2016 Beta 1.

We are constantly improving Telerik Reporting, taking into account your engagement and some great suggestions from our feedback portal. The latest features we've developed for you are now available in with the Beta 1 release. Now you can enjoy improved performance, Private Fonts, Continuous Paper, Can Shrink, Precision and Viewers Events. Below you will find more information about each of them.

Improved Performance

In our constant quest for faster report rendering, in this release we have improved the overall performance up to 25% in all supported document formats.

Private Fonts

No more need to worry about installing fonts on the server, cloud instance, or the available fonts on the client computer. Now you can use any font without installing it on the hosting environment. We support Private Fonts in all rendering extensions and most viewers. For more information, please check out the downloadable documentation in chm format.

Continuous Paper

We have added support for Continuous Paper, so you can use all types of printers, including matrix printers with endless feed.

CanShrink

A CanShrink property for the panel and the report section container items is now available. If the container’s content is hidden or shrunk, when turned on the container will collapse accordingly.

Better Precision

Rendering hundreds pages of reports may cause an accumulation of floating point errors, which result in an unexpected layout. In order to avoid this now the reporting layout engine works with discrete precision of 10 micrometers.

Viewers Events

Sometimes you may want to modify the rendered document prior to serving it to the viewers’ client. Now, this is supported in all report viewers.

Bug Fixes

For information about the included bug fixes check out the release notes.

Download the Beta

To download the beta visit your account download page. The beta download is available to everyone that has downloaded the latest official release, Telerik Reporting R2 SP1. 

Your feedback is extremely valuable for us, so let us know what you think about the new Beta 1 release of Telerik Reporting in the comments below. Additionally, feel free to contact our support team if you come across anything unexpected or have questions. Thank you very much in advance!

What's Next

Finally, a quick brief on what we are still working on:  

• Custom interactivity actions to enable viewer customizations like tooltips
• Embedded Table of Contents within the report body
• PDF password protection with encryption
• Viewer Events to further customize and audit all interactive actions

Learn how to build beautiful native cross-platform apps from a single C# codebase, as we recap our Xamarin.Forms and UI for Xamarin webinar.

Native iOS/Android/Windows apps from a single shared C# codebase? Nope, not a dream but a reality with Xamarin.Forms. You can now use your .NET skills to build modern X-Platform mobile apps and share not just business logic, but UI code as well. You get complete native API access on each platform and modern productive tools to build your dream Xamarin apps.

The out-of-the-box experience is a good place to start, but your professional Xamarin.Forms apps will soon be calling out for polished and well-engineered UI. Who wants to rediscover the wheel on complex UI controls that leverage corresponding platform integrations?

Enter Telerik UI for Xamarin—beautiful, polished and elegant UI controls for your Xamarin apps. You get complex Charts, amazing ListViews and handy SideDrawers—all out of the box. Want hard-hitting performant controls? We’ve got you covered. Need productivity? Our professional Xamarin.Forms UI controls deliver.

Relive the Content

On Jul 20^th 2016, we hosted a webinar that dived into Xamarin.Forms and Telerik UI for Xamarin. Your hosts were: James Montemagno (Principal Program Manager of Xamarin @ Microsoft), Nikolay Diyanov (Product Manager of Telerik UI for Xamarin @ Progress) and your truly, Sam Basu (Developer Advocate @ Progress).

It was an awesome hour. We went as in-depth as possible and showed off some cool demos. We had a huge audience who asked a LOT of questions—understandable given how important the Xamarin toolset has become for .NET developers. If you could not make it for the live webinar, you can relive the webinar in its entirety. High definition recording available now!

Prize Winners

What’s a Progress webinar without some awesome prizes? Our gadget pick this time was the ICE Portable Wireless Floating Bluetooth Speaker—because what else could be cooler that levitating speakers!

We picked three random winners (tentative until accepted) among webinar attendees. You win just for showing up!

1. Jason Coughenour, US, NY
2. Michael Vogel, US, TX
3. Chris Hawkins, US, WA

Congrats winners. Hope you enjoy your prizes!

Additional Question/Answers

One of the most enjoyable aspects of our webinars is the Q&A at the end. We appreciate developers bringing up real-world questions and concerns on the latest technologies.

While we tried to answer as many questions as we could on air, here’s an excerpt of some short Q&A topics that were important to resurface:

Q: Can I use Telerik UI for Xamarin UI controls from both Windows and OSX?
A: Yes, absolutely! You can use the Telerik Xamarin UI controls both from Visual Studio on Windows and Xamarin Studio on a Mac.

Q: What platforms can you target with Xamarin?
A: In short: almost everything, including iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. This is not limited to phones, tablets and desktop only—you could target smart watches and corresponding TV platforms as well.

Q: Do I have to have a Mac when building apps with Xamarin?
A: Only if you are targeting iOS and can be a remote Mac. It is an Apple restriction and the Mac running XCode will only serve up builds for your native iOS app.

Q: How is my Xamarin app packaged up?
A: The end result is a native app on every platform—so APK for Android and IPA for iOS.

Q: How can I incorporate the Telerik UI for Xamarin controls into an existing project?
A: There are three ways. You can download from the Telerik website, use the Telerik Dashboard or simply leverage the NuGet server to pull in the bits. All you need are the right references in your project.

Q: How much code sharing do I get when using Telerik UI for Xamarin.Forms?
A: 100%. The Xamarin.Forms Telerik UI controls render through XAML/C# abstractions and become native UI components on each platform.

Q: How often is Telerik UI for Xamarin updated?
A: UI for Xamarin is actually a part of Telerik DevCraft—so it gets three major updates a year, and smaller patches throughout. Your IDE will prompt you when updates are available.

Q: Is UWP support coming for Telerik UI for Xamarin?
A: Yep, in R3 of 2016 slated for September. Also coming are some brand new controls. For more, please check out the product roadmap.

Resources

• Webinar Recording—http://www.telerik.com/campaigns/xamarin-ui/modern-x-platform-apps-xamarin-webinar
• Xamarin Forms—https://www.xamarin.com/forms
• Telerik UI for Xamarin—http://www.telerik.com/xamarin-ui
• Docs on UI for Xamarin.Forms—http://docs.telerik.com/devtools/xamarin/

That’s a Wrap

This may be one of the best times to be a .NET developer. Thanks to the new .NET Core and toolsets like Xamarin, your .NET apps can go places that were hitherto impossible. With C#, you can truly target any device or platform.

And when your apps crave a polished UI, look no further than Telerik DevCraft—the richest complete .NET UI toolkit and frameworks for all applications, including web, desktop & mobile. Adios and have fun coding! 

Develop custom actions and enjoy PDF password encryption within your reports—part of the latest features in the new Reporting Beta.

In addition to all of the new features we introduced with the Reporting R3 2016 Beta 1, we now want to give you a taste of two new hot features.

Custom Actions

You are now able to invoke custom logic upon clicking on a particular report item from within the report viewers. That functionality comes via a new custom action and handlers. For example, clicking a textbox could show a dialog that allows you to edit the text and save the change, after which the report will re-render. In addition, this way you can implement tooltips based on the report item data context and custom UI.

PDF Security

PDFs are the closest thing the internet has to a paper document. They’re standard, they look the same on every system regardless of what fonts you have installed, and typically aren’t something users can edit.

As with paper documents, some PDFs are intended to be confidential. And if you want to protect a report rendered in PDF, we now support native password-protected encryption with owner and optional user passwords to secure the rendered PDF reports. This allows no one to even view the PDF document content unless they have a password.

Download the Beta

To download the beta visit your account download page. The beta download is available to everyone that has downloaded the latest official release, Telerik Reporting R2 SP1.

Your feedback is extremely valuable for us, so let us know what you think about the new Beta 2 release in the comments below or in our feedback portal. Additionally, feel free to contact our support team if you come across anything unexpected or have questions. Thank you very much in advance!

What's Next

Now that the Universal Windows Platform is officially supported by Xamarin, we're bringing UWP support to our own UI for Xamarin controls. Try out the Beta today.

Undoubtedly, iOS and Android are the top two mobile platforms in popularity, with third place reserved for the Microsoft mobile platforms. Until recently Microsoft's main platform was Windows Universal, but today the Universal Windows Platform is gaining more and more traction and users. We have been supporting all three platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Universal) in our releases while waiting for Universal Windows Platform be officially supported by Xamarin.

That moment came a few months ago, so here we are today—announcing Universal Windows Platform support for Telerik UI for Xamarin. All Telerik UI for Xamarin.Forms controls are getting UWP support. Let’s reiterate which they are:

Chart

Chart is our powerful data visualization component supporting a number of different series including bar, line, area, scatter. You can plot the data against categorical, numerical or datetime axes. The does not just display the data, but also allows you to interact with it—it supports trackball, selection, pan&zoom. Line and band annotations are at your service to better outline what the data shown in the chart means for the end-user.

ListView

With ListView you get all list related features, like load-on-demand, swipe to execute, pull-to-refresh, reorder and many others in a single component.

SideDrawer

SideDrawer shows a side menu, saving you screen real estate. Different animated transitions are supported, including slide in on top, push, fade in and more. You can show the menu from all four sides of the screen.

Calendar

Calendar supports various views including week, month, year. It can display appointments in the week and month cells, just like your standard Calendar application would.

DataForm

DataForm takes a data object and creates fill-in forms, where each data object property can be edited by the editor of the appropriate type. For example: text field for strings, switches for booleans, etc. It supports different validation and different commit modes.

You can find the complete R3 2016 Beta release notes here.

Get the Beta Now!

Feedback

This is a Beta release of our UWP support, and we would really like to receive your valuable feedback. Share your experience using the standard support channels, including our Forums as well as our Support Ticketing System. This will allow us to look into these cases and make the UWP support even better for our official release, which is due in mid-September.

Developers today need to pay attention to evolving platforms that will shape the future: Big Data, Machine Learning and Augmented Reality.

Are we headed into another dimension where data is the new frontier? I addressed this question in a session at M3 Conference called "Into the Next Dimension."

Developers today need to pay attention to evolving platforms and the rapid rate at which they are expanding. I outlined three key technologies that will shape the future: Big Data, Machine Learning, and Augmented Reality.

The session recording is available below along with some extended talking points that weren't covered in the presentation.

Visualizations with Kendo UI

Michelangelo said that "every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." The same can be said for data—every bit of data has a story inside it and it is the task of developers building apps to reveal it. We do this through data visualizations, which is all about providing a view into the world of what the data is telling us.

For some, the era of big data is just around the corner. For others, it's already here. The reality is that big data is coming whether your organization is ready or not. As this data is collected, it becomes increasingly important to understand it through tools that visualize it. That's where solutions like Kendo UI come in.

Kendo UI provides a rich library of charts and graphs to help you visualize data in meaningful ways. In the article "6 Rules for Awesome Data Visualizations with Kendo UI," John Bristowe talks about how Kendo UI provides a powerful foundation to create beautiful data visualizations and shares a list of tips in order to best take advantage of it.

A Content First Digital Experience

There are products that call themselves content management systems (CMS), but in actuality many of these CMS's are document management systems. It's an important distinction that should be taken seriously in this digital age.

As any good developer knows, there should be a clear separation between document, code, and data. With this separation, much more can be done with the data stored within the system.

Take Progress Sitefinity, for example. Sitefinity is a content-first CMS where content is treated as data. By having a clear distinction between data and document, Sitefinity can do much more. In the article "How to Create Mobile Apps with Sitefinity and Telerik Platform", Peter Filipov explains how to use Sitefinity's data to drive a content-driven mobile application.

With the Telerik Platform and Sitefinity you can create fully-functional, content-driven applications without writing any code.

In addition, the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud utilizes data and predictive analytics to create a unified marketing command center that enables marketers to drive growth by understanding, and optimizing every customer’s journey. This is an example of using customer data in a positive way to enhance user experience by providing the user with what they need. Just imagine having Siri/Cortana/Alexa working behind the scenes on behalf of the customer.

Take Your UWP Apps to the Holographic World with Hololens

A unique property of the Microsoft HoloLens is that it can utilize 2D applications in a 3D space. These 2D applications are Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications. Being able to run UWP applications on HoloLens means that developers can reuse existing code and skills to create apps that run not only on HoloLens but also on laptops, phones, tablets, XBox and more.

On HoloLens the AirTap gesture is automatically mapped to click/touch gestures. Because of this feature, existing UWP components like those found in Telerik UI for UWP simply work in the HoloLens as a 2D app. Visualize your data with variety of charts, gauges and bullet graphs or utilize HubTile, LoopingList and ListView, all of which cater to unique UWP UI paradigms.

Stay tuned to Progress for more investments for UWP coming in the future.

The below video demonstrates UWP app with Telerik UI.

The Future Is Ours

Now more than ever, technology is rapidly evolving. No one knows what exactly the future of technology holds, but what is certain is that software developers have lots of options today and tomorrow. Getting involved with these technologies now will help secure a role in the process of building exciting things that were once considered science fiction.

The future is bright for .NET developers. With Microsoft opening up the platform and reinventing the current structure that supports the .NET platform, there are a lot of reasons to get excited.

Earlier this year at Build, Microsoft shared a very clear roadmap for the future of .NET and C#. As a platform, .NET is always changing and evolving to meet the requirements of today’s coding landscape. Microsoft has embraced this, looking to reposition .NET as a platform that can be written anywhere and run anywhere moving forward.

As it currently exists, .NET is scattered. Creating code that spans across Microsoft platforms has meant working with portable class libraries (PCL). While PCL has shared functionality, it is very limited when compared to the .NET framework. Additionally, PCL support on these various platforms isn’t as straightforward as it could be. This leaves developers out in the cold, struggling to identify which APIs are available for any given scenario.

Moving forward, Microsoft is looking to replace PCL with a contract for a common API support, called the .NET Standard Library. With .NET Standard Library, developers will be better able to reuse code, which can save some development time. The learning curve is also smaller, resulting in fewer development hurdles. With .NET Standard Library, developers have a clear foundation to build upon.

C#, as the most popular language for .NET development, also has an exciting future ahead. Microsoft is promising a faster release cycle, which will further enhance C# and give developers new ways to write code with the language.

With Microsoft turning .NET and C# into open source projects, tracking development and the future of these platforms and languages has never been easier. While all of the changes may initially present some challenges for developers, the sheer breadth of new features and enhancements to .NET and C# should excite developers with all the possibilities on the horizon.

If you’d like to read my more detailed thoughts on the future of .NET and C#, check out my blog on App Developer Magazine.

The Telerik UI for WinForms R3 2016 release brings new mapping features, easier conversion and many other improvements.

In the new R3 release of Telerik UI for WinForms, the major highlights are the brand new RadMap control, a new version of our Converter Tool, the addition of the most wanted features in RadRichTextEditor as well as over 100 improvements throughout the suite.

RadMap: Visualize Powerful Data on Maps

RadMap is data visualization control that can display tiles from a web service such as Bing Maps or OpenStreetMaps, or ones stored on the local file system. On top of the tiles or on their own, the control can visualize graphical data from shape files such as ESRI Shapefiles and KML files, or data from a SQL server in the SQL Geospatial format.

The layers built into RadMap allow one to easily organize and display different visual elements. There are a number of such elements that come with the control and can be used in a variety of scenarios. Some of these elements include pins, callouts, routes, air routes, labels and more.

The out-of-the-box features do not end there. Developers can take advantage of a navigation bar, mini map, search bar, scale indicator and a legend, as well as fluid pan and zoom complimented by wraparound functionality.

Digging deeper in the functionality vault of the control there are clusterization strategies for when there are just too many visual elements on the screen. You will also find colorization strategies which increase the readability of the data currently on display.

Thanks to the built-in support for the Bing Maps Route service, the map can aid users with navigation and route planning with ability to position lines/curves with locations exceeding the Longitude limits [-180;180]. Searching for an address should also be a breeze, thanks to the Bing Maps Search service support, allowing the location of businesses and private addresses. The Bing Maps elevation service gives you data that can be crucial for a hiking or mountain biking route plan. There are, certainly, many more useful applications of RadMap which will greatly enrich your next or existing application.

RadMap adds a crucial piece to the WinForms suite, enabling developers to cover even more customer requirements and scenarios. The map control will allow the creation of apps for all sorts of tracking like cargo, shipments, planes, trucks and taxis— or even to create a map of your stadium for booking seats and more. 

Enhanced Conversion Tool (now in Beta)

Top RadRichTextEditor Improvements

Merging Documents

RadDocumentMerger introduces an API which enables users to append one RadDocument instance to another, or to insert one RadDocument instance at the CaretPosition of another RadDocument. The merging conflicts (styles with same names in both documents, section properties at the point of merging) could be customized and therefore resolved with the class settings provided by the utility.

Continuous Section Breaks

We've added functionality to enter a section break and start a new section on the same page. This is useful for creating a formatting change, such as displaying different number of columns on a page.

New Dictionary Formats

Due to popular demand, we have introduced support for the Microsoft .dic format.

Performance Improvements and More Features

The latest bits of Telerik UI for WinForms are already available in your account. If you don’t have one, you can try it out with a free trial.

As always, feel free to use our Feedback portal to share your ideas and/or vote for existing ones.

Top requested features from the community, such as RESTful APIs and an improved Report Engine, are here with the Telerik Report Server R3 2016 release.

RESTful Report Server APIs

Now, you can make the Report Server an integrated part of any software solution. It is available through RESTful Report Server APIs that support different functionalities like report management, scheduling tasks, data alerts and report export. New and extensive APIs open up new possibilities to integrate and automate your reporting needs and streamline the reporting processes of your organization and clients.   

Improved Reporting Engine  

Key New Reporting Features

• The TOC is fully interactive in all Report Viewers and in exported PDF and Word documents
• The overall report rendering is improved up to 25% 
• A CanShrink property for the panel and the report section container items is now available
• Private Fonts in all rendering extensions and most viewers are now available—you don’t need to install a font on the hosting environment in order to use it in a report.
• We’ve added support for continuous feed printers, so you can use Reporting with all types of printers, including matrix ones. 
• And last but not least now the reporting layout engine works with discrete precision of 10 micrometers to avoid floating point errors, which may result in an unexpected layout when rendering reports with hundreds of pages. 

All the fine-tuning we've done and the new features we've added make Telerik Report Server the best fit for any business demanding a complete report management solution. We are very excited to continue improving the reporting solutions and introduce important and innovative features in the future.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions in our portal or in the comments below, and stay tuned for further developments.  

We've implemented the most popular feature requests and added powerful new functionality to help you build the best WPF and Silverlight apps yet.

New features like a 3D Chart, PasswordBox and new Office 2016 theme are just part of the latest additions to UI for WPF that are now available with the R3 2016 version of the suite. This release includes a lot of improvements and great new features in UI for Silverlight as well.

A Secure Password Box

The most voted feature request in our Feedback portal was for a password box, so we've developed one for you! I'm glad to announce that the brand new control RadPasswordBox is now available in the UI for WPF suite. The top features of the control are:

• Secure Password functionality   
• Customizable button for showing ad hiding the password
• Watermark
• Easy customization of styles and support of all 19 themes for WPF

New Visualizations with 3D ChartView

Another addition to our WPF suite is the RadCartesianChart3D component. This include everything you need to visualize your 3d data in bar, points or surface areaseries, and along numeric and categorical axes. Follow our Getting Started article and try it yourself.

• Surface, Bar (Manhattan) and Point series
• Linear and categorical axes
• Axis smart labels
• Customization abilities for the default visuals—custom colors (materials), and custom shapes (geometries)
• Palettes
• Tooltips
• Camera behavior allowing to move the camera position
• Grid and Strip lines

Official LayoutControl

• Save and load the layout:This feature allows you to save the current state of the layout and restore it afterwards. You can read more about it in the Save/Load Layout help article. 
• Toolbox:The toolbox allows you to easily add items to the layout control via drag/drop. You can also use it to keep track of deleted items or the hierarchical structure of the layout. You can read more about this in the ToolBox documentation section.
• Design time support: You can now arrange the layout using the toolbox at design time.

New Theme in UI for WPF—Office 2016

The highly requested Office 2016 theme is now here. It supports dynamic changes (like the other themes we released this year) to the FontSizeand FontFamilyproperties. The Office2016theme also exposes an easy way to modify the corner radius of many elements in your application. You can use the corner radius properties of the palette. By default all radius values are 0.

Glyphs Instead of Icons

As part of the Office2016theme we are introducing a new approach to add icons and icon-like images. Instead of images or paths we are using a font of glyphs by default. The TelerikWebUI font provides over 400scalable vector glyphsthat are available for use to our clients.

We have chosen this approach to icons in this theme for a number of reasons. Glyphs are easily scalable and colored and there's a wide range of built-in glyphs to choose from, among other benefits. They are available for use in any of our themes, when the needed resources are included. They are not specific for the Office2016 theme. You can read more about glyphs here.

New Features in Existing Controls

Selection is a very important function in UI, so we've now added more ways for the end-user to select the needed data within several of our components.

Column Selection in RadGridView for WPF and Silverlight

As of R3 2016 entire columns can be added to RadGridView's selection with convenient UI by the end user or via a single property. You can read how easily this can be enabled in our documentation. In addition, we have extended the selection API with a SelectCellRegion method to allow you to select specific region(s) of cells. Its overloads allow you to pass as a parameter either a single CellRegion instance or a collection of cell regions.

Selection in RadPivotGrid for WPF

RadPivotGrid gives you the option to select multiple or individual cells, rows and columns using the mouse. By default the selection functionality is disabled and to turn it on you have to set the AllowSelection property of the PivotGrid to true.

MultiSelection in RadComboBox

With the new release you can now allow multiple selection in RadComboBox by setting AllowMultipleSelection property to True.

By applying a custom ItemTemplate with a CheckBox control inside, you could easily achieve multiselection with checkboxes. Also three commands are now added to the control API, enabling implementation of multiple clients scenarios.

Customize the Selection of RadSpreedsheet for WPF and Silverlight

RadSpreadsheet exposes several properties (SelectionStroke, SelectionStrokeThickness, SelectionFill  and FillHandleSelectionStroke) that let you control the way the selection in the control is rendered. You can read more about them in our documentation.

Merging and More in RadRichTextBox

RadRichTextBox for WPF and Silverlight now allows you to easily merge two documents into one instead appending them only via the new RadDocumentMerger class. You can read more about this API in our documentation.

Another addition to this component is new type of section breaks -continuous section breaks which allow the next section to start on the same page. This type of section break is useful for creating a formatting change, such as a different number of columns, on a page.

Last, but not least for RadRichTextBox is the newly added support for the Microsoft dictionaries for spell checking (dlx).

WrapAround in RadMap for WPF

The new WrapAround property of RadMap for WPF provides (infinite) horizontal panning to the RadMap control. This generates a continuous experience as the user pans the viewport east or west. 

Please note that the MapQuestMode of the OpenStreetMap provider is now marked as obsolete, due to changes in the MapQuest services and licensing.

RadAutoCompleteBox Enhancement

With this release two properties are added to the RadAutoCompleteBox—NoResultsContent and NoResultsContentTemplate. These allow you easily to add text or other content that will appear in the drop down whenever the control cannot find any matching items. 

Demos, Feedback and Even More Great Updates

You can find a full list of all new features and fixed bugs in our Release Notes. Don't forget to try out the new additions here in our demo application. After that, download the new version and give us your feedback, and we'll continue to build the latest and greatest UI for WPF and Silverlight suites for you.

Present deeper and more engaging data with the new 3D charts in UI for WPF. Learn all about this new feature, just released with R3 2016 of UI for WPF.

3D movies and 3D printers are becoming more and more popular. So is our RadChartView. This is why we with the R3 2016 release of UI for WPF we decided to go 3D—and the results are outstanding!

The RadCartesianChart3D (currently in CTP) is a new addition to the RadChartView set and is the first control in the set to visualize data in a three dimensional manner. The chart uses the WPF API for 3D rendering so you do not need to worry about including third party libraries.

While this is a brand new control, it has an API very similar to the one in the other charts in the set. So, if you have already used our charts—you will find setting up the new control to be very easy. If you have not yet used our charts, well, what are you waiting for?

There are plenty of application scenarios, such as business, financial, scientific, statistical or other types of apps, which may need to display three dimensional data to better present a case. Another fit might be for some modern topics such as Machine Learning and AI, or even manifold learning.

Getting Started

• Add three axes (X, Y, Z). Choose between categorical and linear.
• Add at least one series. You can either add data points in XAML for a quick test, or you can data bind the series to an items source.
• Add a camera behavior in the Behaviors collection. This will allow you to rotate and zoom the chart via mouse and touch.
• Add a grid, so that you can see grid lines and strip lines.

Let's see some code:

But What's In It?

Even though the chart was just introduced as a CTP, it comes with a very powerful set of features covering plenty of application scenarios. Let's dive into some of the key new features.

Series Types

There are three built-in series—surface series, point series, and bar series (a.k.a. Manhattan chart).

Appearance

You can control the appearance of the data point visuals. You can set custom materials, which allow you to determine what color the 3D elements get, how glossy and shiny they are, and so on. You can set custom geometries, which allow you to determine the shape of the visuals. All three series expose material and geometry selector functionality so that each point can look differently.

Behaviors

We have introduced a camera behavior and a tooltip behavior. The camera behavior will allow you to rotate the camera around the center of the chart and move it towards or away from this center. This creates the illusion that the chart is being spun and zoomed in and out. The tooltip behavior shows information about hovered data point visuals.

Advanced

Each series has its own features, too. The point series allows you to choose a point size. The bar series lets you to choose a display direction. The surface series exposes many advanced features such as different color modes and custom triangulation abilities.

We have prepared two built-in colorizers. One colorizes the surface in accordance to its display direction, and the other colorizes each point with color depending on the underlying data item (a.k.a. 4D surface chart). You can use the TriangleIndices property to show a more complex surface, for example data that does not come from a tabular (two-dimensional) items source.

Play with a 3D Chart Demo

Take a look at our Demo application for more examples, our SDK samples, and online documentation. Let us know in the comments below or in our Feedback Portal how you like things so far and what features you want to see next.

In the latest release of Telerik Reporting, it's easier than ever to accommodate strict security and create tamper-proof reports.

One of the significant new features in Telerik Reporting R3 2016 is the improved security of the ObjectDataSource component. If strict security limitations require you to ensure only your code is executed by the report engine, the new settings allow you to do it.

Designing and Previewing Reports

In the Standalone Report Designer things are pretty straightforward—to use types from another assembly you have to include it in the AssemblyReference element anyway. But as you may have guessed, this change would lead to some issues during design-time in Visual Studio Report Designer. Before you sigh in resignation and diligently start digging into Visual Studio’s devenv.config file, here is the twist—you don’t have to.

When you are configuring an ObjectDataSource using the Wizard, the required assembly reference will be automatically added to the project’s configuration file upon successful completion. For convenience, it will be added even when the type used by the ObjectDataSource is declared in the same assembly. If the project lacks a configuration file, a new one will be automatically created and included in your project.

When previewing a report in Visual Studio Report Designer, the engine will extract the assembly references from the project configuration file and verify the type, declared in the ObjectDataSource definition, against them. In case the target type is not found, a SecurityException will be thrown.

Usage in a Standalone Application

When showing reports that use an ObjectDataSource instance in any report viewer, you should consider if the used type's assembly should be declared in the application’s configuration file. As we said before, if the type used by the ObjectDataSource component shares the same assembly with the report, you don’t have to do anything—it will just work (see our example ListBoundReport if you still have some doubts).

However, you probably use an external assembly to store your business objects—in that case you have to add the assembly name in the Telerik.Reporting section of your application’s config file (app.config or web.config). You can either copy it from your report library project’s configuration file (the ObjectDataSource Wizard has put it there, remember?) or add it manually. Finally, your configuration file should look like the one shown below:

We believe that the new way the ObjectDataSource component resolves types will add up to the creation of reliable and tamper-proof reports, protecting your data and securing your applications. Try it out as part of the latest Reporting release today.

Did you know that we maintain a private NuGet feed for Telerik products? Get quick updates for Kendo UI, Telerik Developer Tools and more easily through NuGet.

Constantly working towards a smoother and more successful deployment, we provide our own NuGet feed for distributing product packages. It's been a while since we published our private NuGet feed—it's time to announce it for those who haven't tried it yet.

Why Use the NuGet Feed?

The idea of the NuGet feed is to provide a fast way to obtain the latest releases of our products.

• It automatically configures your projects by adding assembly references, creating and adding project files, etc.
• It manages package dependencies
• It provides package updates
• It does the job very conveniently

What Products Are Available in the Feed Now?

• UI for ASP.NET MVC
• Kendo UI Professional
• UI for ASP.NET Core
• UI for ASP.NET AJAX
• UI for Xamarin Cross-Platform
• Reporting
• UI for Universal Windows Platform
• UI for Windows Universal
• UI for Windows Phone 8

How to Configure the Feed?

You have to setup https://nuget.telerik.com/nuget as another package source in the NuGet Package Manager. To gain access to the feed you have to provide your Telerik account credentials:

What's Coming Next?

We're considering adding support for trial users. Please share your feedback in the comments below, and let us know if there is anything else that you need!