The new release of Progress Telerik UI for WPF and Progress Telerik UI for Silverlight is just around the corner—here's a quick sneak peak what's new in RadScheduleView.

The R2 2017 release of UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight is almost here, and we're busy preparing lots of great features and updates. As we wrap up the release, we wanted to share some key new changes in the RadScheduleView.

New SubGroupsFilter

One of the most desired RadScheduleView features in our feedback portal—hierarchical grouping of resources—will be now possible using the new SubGroupsFilter predicate. In the predicate, you will receive each of the subgroups and will be able choose whether to display a group header for the group or not. Using the filter could allow having resources with different sub-resources as shown below:

Support for Arabic Calendars like Shamsi (Persian) and Hijri

In the previous major release (R1 2017) of UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight we introduced Arabic calendars support for RadCalendar and RadDateTimePicker. With R2 2017, RadScheduleView will fully support all the available globalization calendars in the .NET framework. The control will display and use the calendar from the current application culture out of the box, without any additional effort:

Other Improvements

Rendering optimizations and improvements of the current time indicator, mouse over and special slots implementations are part of the updates that are coming. This release will also include a new option in the ScheduleViewDragDropBehavior that will allow you to cache the dragged data when performing external drag operation.

Getting excited about the R2 2017 release? Stay tuned for many more new features and improvements coming next month. In the meantime, please feel free to share your feedback regarding the control and whole suite through our Feedback portal, and check out our roadmap to see what's coming next.

UI for WinForms is giving your Windows apps a new power today—support for high resolution DPI monitors is now a built-in part of UI for WinForms.

Today we’re introducing built-in HDPI support in the Telerik UI for WinForms suite. This coincides with the HDPI improvements Microsoft is bringing with .NET 4.7 and the Windows 10 Creators Update. The best part is that you will get this support no matter which .NET framework you are targeting (currently supported from .NET 2.0 and up).

All you’ll have to do is declare your application as DPI aware and RadControls will scale their UI elements in accordance to the current DPI settings automatically. To do that, you have to have an app.manifest file and/or an app.config file with several lines of code. You can see examples of that in our previous blog post on the Hight DPI in WinForms matter and in this Microsoft blog post. We will look into the technical details further down this post.

With the changes we are introducing, the common problem of bad scaling when your apps run on high resolution monitors goes away, so your app will ship with higher quality on more systems instantly. The problem with the blurry fonts and unreadable texts will be eliminated and the potential of modern hardware will be utilized fully.

Although it's a bit tricky to demonstrate HDPI support with a single image, here is an example with screenshots of the same application on two different monitors. You can get a real sense of the difference when you open the full image and zoom-in. You will notice that the right image will become blurry unlike the left one.

How to Enable HDPI Support in Your Application

To save you the digging, here are the two ways you can make your application DPI aware:

The first way is to add an app.manifest file to your project. In that manifest file add the following XML:

Note that declaring DPI awareness in the app.manifest file breaks ClickOnce applications. The suggested way to avoid this brings us to the second option, which is only available if your project's target framework is .NET 4.7 and requires you to have an app.manifest and an app.config files added to your project. Inside the config file you should have the following settings:

and inside the manifest file you should declare your app compatible with Windows 10:

What's Next?

Get Started with JustMock

The move to open source was a big change for Telerik UI for UWP. See what’s new after recent the open source announcement.

In February, we announced that Telerik UI for UWP would be going open source and the reception from the community has been great. We’ve got our first contributors and have provided lots of additions to the project ourselves. In the last couple of months, plenty of improvements were made both in the controls and the code as well as the repo to make it even easier to navigate and use. The CI build was also put in place, and will get merged to the main branch soon. The biggest feature we’ve added is support for accessibility, which I would like to share more details on.

For the full list of new features and improvements to the Progress Telerik products, make sure to sign up for the Telerik R2 Release Webinar.

Keyboard

IsTabStop and TabIndex are fully functional for all controls as well as the tab orders of composite elements such as ListBox, Grid and Radial Menu.

For UI elements that can be invoked, keyboard event handlers for the Spacebar and Enter keys are introduced. This makes the basic keyboard accessibility support complete and enables users to accomplish basic app scenarios using only the keyboard. That is, users can reach all interactive UI elements and activate the default functionality.

Where arrow key navigation is applicable for navigating among child elements, this was also put in place.

Automation Peers

Telerik UI for UWP provides built-in support for Microsoft UI Automation—the accessibility framework for Microsoft Windows. UI Automation support is implemented through a tree of peer classes that derive from FrameworkElementAutomationPeer. We follow the convention about naming the peer classes—they begin with the control class name and end with “AutomationPeer”.

HighContrast Theme

All controls support high contrast theme and when the Widows theme is switched to high contrast, the controls will change their theme accordingly. High contrast themes use a small palette of contrasting colors that makes the interface easier to see.

Head to GitHub for a checklist of all Telerik UI for UWP accessible controls.

In Closing

Take a look at the OSS project when you have a chance, and feel free to share any feedback or add your own contributions.

Lastly, if you will be attending Microsoft //Build next week, be sure to stop by our Booth (#108) for some demos and discussions with the product team.

The latest UI for WPF is here with Material Theme, a Virtual Grid, more secure PDFs and much more.

I am happy to announce that yet another strong release for UI for WPF with R2 2017 is now live, including a new control, a new theme as well as plenty of features and improvements. Let me walk you through a short summary on the release highlights.

For the full list of new features and improvements to the Telerik products, make sure to sign up for the Telerik R2 Release Webinar.

Material Theme

Our users know that using our controls is the way to ensure their applications are always providing the latest and greatest UI and UX. With the recent introduction of our Office2016 and Office2016Touch themes now is the time for the next big thing—Material theme, which incorporates the material design guidelines and brings a modern and slick UI to your app.

With Material, it is all about interaction, animations, shadows and depth—you have to try it to get a real feel, but I don’t want to torture you, so let me show you a couple  of screenshots .

Want to learn more? Take a look at the blog post we have on the material theme.

Virtual Grid (CTP)

Grids are common controls in most applications, and our industry leading RadGridView control is packed with features to cover every need you may have. Still, there are cases where you have a lot of data to operate with. I mean a lot, like millions or billions of entries! In such cases, maybe it is not feasible to load all this data in memory. Here is where RadVirtualGrid comes handy—with it, you don’t have any data stored, but instead, when data is needed the grid will ask for it, so you can fetch it just like in web controls. This way, no matter if you have millions, billions or gazillion entries, your users will be able to work with all of it flawlessly.

RadVirtualGrid ships as a CTP as we wanted to get your feedback on it. In the first version it ships with the following features:

• Rows and Columns UI Virtualization
• Loading data on demand (data virtualization)
• Editing (custom editors are supported)
• Pinned rows (bottom, top)
• Pinned columns (left right)
• Conditional visual customization of cells
• Touch support
• Customizable DataProviders (MVVM friendly)

Next, we are planning on introducing:

• Sorting
• Filtering
• Keyboard Navigation
• Cell Selection with different modes
• Column width modes: "Fixed", "Star" (proportional), "Fit content"
• Customizable context menus
• More options for customizations

Hierarchical Grouping and Arabic Calendars Support in RadScheduleView

A highly requested and very useful feature comes to RadScheduleView—grouping hierarchical resources. Whether you want to create staff, medical office, car shop or hotel schedules, this feature will allow you to do this in an easy to read and use manner.

In addition, RadScheduleView now supports Arabic calendars such as Shamsi (Persian) or Hijri, which enables usage of the control in apps shipped or targeting these geographic regions.

Digital Signature Validation Support for RadPdfViewer

Authenticity and security are main concerns for businesses and governments in a variety of verticals like financial, legal, pharmaceutical, public administration, etc. Hence the need for high assurance when signing documents distributed electronically. In this release, RadPdfViewer comes with a built-in functionality to display signatures and to verify their authenticity. The UI is enhanced with a signature panel that shows a summary form validating all signatures in the document, and dialog which pops up with detailed information for the particular signature when the user clicks on it.

RadPdfProcessing Interactive Forms and Form Fields Support

Take advantage of convenient API for the creation and modification of interactive forms and form fields in PDF documents. This means that you can automate the process of filling PDF forms as well as extract information from a bunch of PDF forms filled with data from users. All field types defined in the PDF specification are supported, including text boxes, list boxes, combo boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons and signatures.

RadPdfProcessing Signing and Signature Verification

One of the most important interactive fields in a PDF document can be the digital signature, so we are providing APIs to digitally sign or verify the authenticity of a digitally signed PDF documents. The useful API for editing form fields allows full customization of the visual representation of the signature field.

RadDock—Extended Layout Capabilities

With this release, a new feature of the split containers is shipping that allows you to have a fixed sized for the pane groups, in addition to the relative sizing it already supports. This enables you to achieve plenty of new scenarios, so you can cover every requirement that comes your way.

We Want Your Feedback

Please feel free to share any comments below. If you have any suggestions or you cannot find the feature or control that you need, feel free to use our Feedback Portals about UI for WPF and Document Processing Libraries. 

Try out the latest:

UI for WPF
UI for Silverlight

In case you missed it, here are some of the updates from our last release.

Searching for fast and beautiful UI to speed up development of cross-platform mobile apps? Check out the latest updates in UI for Xamarin, including new components, Visual Studio improvements, Mac support and more.

Hi there mobile dev fellows :). Let me guide you through the new stuff in UI for Xamarin, which we've added specifically to help you build great cross-platforms apps with great UX quickly! 

The R2 release of UI for Xamarin is here with five new components, a lot of productivity improvements, a DayView to RadCalendar and more predefined scenario templates.

For the full list of new features and improvements to the Progress Telerik products, make sure to sign up for the Telerik R2 Release Webinar.

First, let me introduce:

RadLinearGauge

Check out more about all of its features like Axis, Ranges, Indicators and more in our documentation.

RadTabView (Beta)

RadTabView is also fully customizable. You can easily change the ControlTemplate of items and the position of tab strip—Up or Down. You can find more information about this here.

RadBusyIndicator

This component displays a notification whenever a longer-running process is being handled by the application. It comes with eight predefined stunning animations and the option to build a custom one. You can read more about it here.

RadRating

RadRating comes with predefined shapes and an option to use a custom ones to achieve all scenarios you may have .

RadSegmented

And the last addition to our suite is a segmented items control. This allows you to have a list of button-like items which you can use for simple navigation with a great UX, or as options display to your apps.

DayView to RadCalendar

The new view of RadCalendar is here with an all day area, configurable time ruler and an API that allows you to schedule appointments and achieve your scheduling functionality.

RadListView and RaChartView Improvements

Our major component RadListView is also improved with Command support. Also, our RadChartView is now even more MVVM friendly, allowing developers to easily bind and format Labels to the data object.

Increased Productivity—New Binaries Structure, Visual Studio Extensions, iOS Installers and More

As developers we know how difficult setting up a project can be, and how important it is to get to the real coding! That is why every day we think about how to provide you with a more productive toolset. See what we've got for you this time:

• Now UI for Xamarin binaries are sorted in a flat folder structure—To improve the experience involved in manual referencing, we unified the names of the binaries across all platforms. Now binaries built for a specific platform are sorted in a folder named after the respective platform. E.g. all binaries that are meant to be used in the UWP projects are placed in the UWP folder 
• Use custom renders?—This is now easier than ever. No additional code is needed to register them. Read more in our blog post.
• Develop on Mac?—Now you can download and test the new installation wizard on a Mac.
• App too big and you don't need all the assemblies?—Try our separate nuget packages.
• Fan of Visual Studio?—On top of the already existing support of Visual Studio 2017, we have now added more Visual Studio goodies. They're added in the Telerik menu in the IDE and include more predefined Visual Studio Templates to get you started.

Download a Free Trial Today

Making your development easy and enabling you with all of the components that you need is our mission, and the mission of Telerik UI for Xamarin . 

But don’t take our word for it—download a free trial today and see it for yourself. 

When we say Telerik UI for WinForms is the most innovative Windows Forms product out there, we mean it. The latest release features high DPI support, a new Material theme and more.

Telerik UI for WinForms once again proves it is the most innovative Windows Forms product out there. Thanks to our flexible Telerik Presentation Framework, which forms the foundation of the suite, we are able to deliver outstanding features that aren’t commonly found in Windows Forms, such as high DPI support. Let me walk you through the highlights of the latest release.

For the full list of new features and improvements to the Telerik products, make sure to sign up for Telerik R2 Release Webinar.

High DPI Support

These days, monitors with high resolutions and higher DPI settings are commonplace. This means your applications need to scale to these resolutions so they can be readable in every environment. While Windows does have a scaling functionality embedded, it takes a bitmap of the screen and scales it accordingly, which often leads to blurry UI and terrible UX. With this release, we have added support for RadForm and all RadControls to scale and render properly in various DPI settings. Text is also rendered crisp and clear.

To read more about this feature, please refer to this blog post on high DPI scaling, or read our documentation.

Material Theme

At our core, we want our users to be able to create sleek, modern applications. Staying true to that commitment, we’re helping our users utilize the latest UX and UI design trends with addition of the 20^th theme to the suite—the Material theme. This theme is unique as it incorporates design elements like depth, motion, drop shadows, slick transitions and much more.

RadPdfViewer Supports Digital Signature

Authenticity and security are main concerns for businesses and governments in a variety of verticals like financial, legal, pharmaceutical, public administration, etc. Hence the need for high assurance when signing documents distributed electronically. In this release, RadPdfViewer comes with a built-in functionality to display signatures and to verify their authenticity.

RadPdfProcessing Signing and Signature Verification

The library for the creation and editing of PDF documents now features digital signature support as well. With the convenient APIs, you can sign documents or verify the authenticity of signed ones.

RadPdfProcessing Forms and Form Fields Support

Take advantage of our convenient API for the creation and modification of forms and form fields in PDF documents.

In Closing

If you are eager to try this out, download the newest version from your account (or if you don’t have one, get a trial). Feel free to post any comments below. If you have any additional feedback or ideas, share them via our feedback portal.

In case you missed it, here are some of the updates from our last release.

The second major release of 2017 for the Progress Telerik developer tools is here, and it’s jam packed with new productivity features. Read on for a breakdown.

As we get ready for the /build conference where we will come out in force (and yes, this means a pre-con party plus some surprises), we have some big announcements to make here at home.

Firstly, the new website look and feel—we hope it gets you to your favorite tools faster and more easily! In addition, now you have better visibility into the vast portfolio of the wider company—check out all that Progress has to offer! Some cool stuff for devs in there for many data-related scenarios.  

If you are going to be at the /build conference, please stop by the Telerik booth (#108) to see the latest bits in action. For the other millions of other .NET ninjas who aren’t lucky enough to grab one of the ~6000 /build tickets, there is a webinar for that! Also, note I am focusing on all things .NET here. For summary of the Kendo UI R2 2017 release, head over to Petyo’s blog post for Angular and Typescript fans.

But you are reading this post for the product news—right? So, without further ado, here is the Telerik R2 2017 summary. Go grab a coffee, there is plenty to explore here and ultimately improve your productivity.

Updates in the Telerik R2 2017 Release

• Telerik UI for Xamarin

We have 3 new components, Visual Studio templates and added new features to existing components. See it all at the Xamarin what’s new page and in this blog post.

• Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Core

The already robust suite now has support for the Bootstrap 4 theme as well as the new Sass theme. See it all at the ASP.NET MVC what's new page and the ASP.NET Core what’s new pages.

• Telerik UI for WPF

A new Virtual Grid Control, Material Design Theme and tons of improvements and features for the already available controls. See more details at the UI for WPF what's new page and in this blog post.

• Telerik UI for WinForms

UI for WinForms is the first suite on the market with High DPI Support. We are also introducing a new Material Design theme and further improvements to our controls. See more details at the UI for WinForms what’s new page and in this blog post.

• Telerik UI for UWP

If you didn’t catch the news, we open sourced UWP controls under the Apache 2.0 license. That said, we are continually adding new features, and have added accessibility features to the suite. See it all at the UWP what's new page and in this blog post.

• Telerik Reporting

We have added Angular 2 support and ODBC support. See it all at the Reporting what's new page.

• JustMock

JustMock now comes with Visual Studio 2017 compatibility! See details at the JustMock what's new page and in this blog post.

Join Us for the Release Webinar

Come join Telerik Developer Advocates John Bristowe, Ed Charbeneau and Sam Basu for the Telerik R2 2017 release webinar. We’ll unpack the release to show you all the .NET ninja tools you can use right away!

Register for the Webinar

Check out the latest updates in Reporting and Report Server, from Angular to OpenEdge and more.

The R2 2017 release of Reporting is live. For this release we have delivered some long-awaited features:

Angular Report Viewer

About a month ago the Angular team released Angular 4.0.0, and today we are happy to announce that Telerik Reporting can now be integrated into Angular applications out-of-the-box. The Angular Report Viewer provides a component which can be used in Angular apps with both WebPack and SystemJS module loaders. The Angular component wraps the Telerik Reporting HTML5 Report Viewer, which is our most popular report viewer for web applications.

Query Designer Support for Progress OpenEdge ODBC Data Providers

Now Progress OpenEdge database users can quickly generate their SQL queries with the SQL Data Source Query Builder. The Standalone Designer's visual tool for creating complex database queries now supports OpenEdge databases when using an ODBC connection. Additionally, Query Builder now also works with ODBC connections for all supported databases.

Report Server Storage Migration Tool

In this release of Report Server we introduced a highly anticipated feature that will allow the Report Server administrators to migrate, backup or export their assets storage to another database or repository.

The migration tool comes in two flavors: a command-line interface and a WinForms GUI. It allows migrating from and to any of the supported storage types (File, Redis, MSSQL Server), providing a detailed log for the migration process.

With this tool, we continue the line of adding valuable additions to our Report Server, following the WhiteLabeling and RESTful API features from our previous releases.  

Eliminating Bugs

For the full list of all the bug fixes, check the Release Notes.

You can learn more about these new features from our Progress Telerik R2 May 2017 Release Webinar, that will be held on May 25^th 11:00 AM ET.

Looking forward to Microsoft Build 2017? So are we! There about bound to be some amazing announcements. We will be there too (booth #108), so make sure to stop by, meet the team and discuss the latest trends in tech, including our UI for UWP and UI for Xamarin. We have some cool SWAG too.

Micorosft /build starts in just a few days and the excitement around the event is growing by the minute. As usual, there are high expectations for the conference with large announcements by Microsoft and various sessions and talks by some of the biggest names in the industry.

Parties, Connections and Mingling

There is no question that Build offers great opportunities to connect attendees, be it around the conference floor or at the various surrounding events and parties, and we have already marked a few meetups on our calendars. We will be hosting a Progress Telerik party too, so should you arrive in Seattle a day sooner, drop by the TapHouseGrill after 7pm on the 9^th of May for a few drinks and snacks on us. Let’s get this conference started! RSVP here and get some cool swag too.

Progress at /build: Booth and Sessions

We wouldn’t miss the conference for the world and as usual the cool guys from the Product and Developer Relations teams will be present there. Head over and meet us at Booth 108, where we will have some great product demos and prize giveaways, as well as giving out our epic .NET Ninja Returns t-shirts.

Sessions

At Build 2016, John Bristowe talked about NativeScript and VS Code. It’s a great honor for us to have him speaking at the conference this year again. He will be hosting a session on “Creating Custom UI Controls in XAML,” focusing on the end-to-end control development of what is needed to ensure a great custom piece of UI. Stay tuned for details on the time and location.

Telerik UI for Xamarin Licenses for Free

If you haven’t had a chance to play around with our UI controls for Xamarin, you can get a product demo at our booth. You can also score one of 100 UI for Xamarin licenses by tweeting the answer to “What would you build with UI for Xamarin?” with #TelerikUIforXamarin.

What would you build? (Tweet this)

You can see the full terms, plus learn more about what we're up to at Build right here.

Telerik UI for UWP—Open Sourced

Windows 10 has seen growing adoption among desktop users and is now the second most used OS in the world, making up about 25% of the market. With this shift towards the new OS, more and more Win32, WinForms and WPF applications will have to be converted to UWP through the Desktop Bridge and many more will be created from scratch. In a survey over 52% of /build keynote watchers said they will move to Windows 10 soon because of Bash.

As usual, the creation of UI elements can be a handful, when it comes to timely delivery. However, if you are in need UWP UI—do not despair. As of the beginning of this year, UI for UWP is open-sourced and available on GitHub. You can get a UI for UWP demo by the same developers who build the product at our booth.

See You at //Build!

It has been a great year for Microsoft so far and we expect the conference to bring some more juicy announcements. Can’t wait!

Reporting solutions and control suites are both powerful options for presenting data. We analyze how you can choose which is best for you.

We are living in a world where technologies develop so rapidly that it is difficult to stay ahead of them. New tools are entering the market every day and sometimes we can hardly decide how to differentiate and apply them properly to our projects. With this article, we try to help you decide between when to use a reporting solution and when to build custom views with a control suite in your application.

We will go through some main use cases and recommend the best fit for each. In addition, we will deep-dive into the most beneficial scenarios for a reporting solution. Of course, from а reporting point of view, we will also examine the features of Progress Telerik Reporting.

Reporting Solutions vs. Control Suites

Reporting solutions are created with the purpose of quickly making data visualizations from various data sources purposed for previewing, printing, sharing and archiving. On the other hand, control suites are built with customizability, live updates, and interactivity in mind. In recent years, reporting solutions have started to advance more actively in the interactivity area as well.

Firstly, let's review the common use cases, where both perform equally well:

Use Cases Where Both Perform Well

• Data mashing (or the ability to display data from multiple data sources)
• Conditional formatting as a possible styling option (or the ability to change the appearance of data based on pre-defined conditions)
• Displaying hierarchical data, as well displaying data analysis and graphs
• Crosstab/pivot data tables and presentations

Then come the differences—let's talk about where each type excels:

Control Suites Advantages

• Data input (CRUD—create, read, update and delete)
• Fast browsing of large data sets (paging virtualization)
• Rich customization in theming
• Animation options
• Live data/dashboards

Reporting Suites Advantages

• Easier to layout and achieve the desired look with WYSIWYG business user-friendly designer
• Variety of styling possibilities—CSS-like styling, conditional formatting based on complex formulas
• Reporting deals with full data sets (filtering, sorting, parameters)
• Simple to setup interactivity—Interactive Sorting, Toggle Visibility, Table of Contents and Document Map, Navigate to Report, Navigate to Bookmark, Navigate to URL, plus whatever you need with custom actions
• Designed for printing media and designated page settings in its core
• Comprehensive selection of export formats for sharing and archiving
• Designed for report definition reuse—cross-platform, cross-technology (web, mobile, and desktop) offering the same report outlook

Now, let us review some scenarios of Reporting vs. UI controls implementations:

Common Reporting Scenarios

• If you can't spare skilled developers to design and implement reports, you can use professionals with basic data operations and/or business understanding and utilize an easy to learn WYSIWYG Standalone Report Designer
• If animated data visualizations are required, you will need a control suite that supports various animations
• If you have to embed the same data preview in a web and desktop application, then with a reporting solution you can reuse the same report definitions (views) and utilize the dedicated report preview controls/widgets
• If you need to avoid the recompilation of the application every time a new report definition is needed or simple change is required, you should use a reporting solution that works with XML report definition, so you can publish new/updated report definitions without even restarting the application
• If you have a requirement to allow end users to alter/author data presentations, you should use the Standalone Report Designer which does not require additional licensing and you can provide it for free

Finally, let’s deep-dive into Reporting with some tips and tricks for better data visualization and report usage:

Diving Deeper into Reporting

• Utilize the power of report data binding combined with simple grouping/sorting/filtering expressions. The reporting handles all data scopes generation and the corresponding data presentation repetition for you, making it much easier to produce analytical, master-detail, form reports or whatever your requirement is.
• Use stylesheets whenever possible. Later the same styles can be used in the next report, or if a styling change is required you will avoid altering every single report and only apply it to the stylesheet.
• Play with the advanced paging rules that a reporting solution provides for the report items like keep-together on the same page, stick with other bands, repeat bands on each page, print at bottom. This allows great control for reports designed with printing purpose.
  
• Consider using the Standalone Report Designer, which is application dedicated to designing reports and works with XML report definitions. This way you will not have to recompile your application for any small change made to a report definition. The designer does not require any additional licensing fees. What Telerik Reporting adds on top is a self-containing report format called TRDP (Telerik Reporting Definition Package), which contains the XML report definition plus all necessary resources like images and CSV data in it, zip packaged, making it perfect for sharing through email or storing for review.
• Evaluate the Progress Telerik Report Server, if you need a dedicated ready-to-use solution to store, manage, schedule and deliver reports. The Report Server in its core uses the Telerik Reporting engine, thus you get all of the reporting engine goodies with all of the report server solution benefits out of the box.

Consider Your Needs to Decide What Fits

Both Reporting and UI control suites are compelling data presentment solutions, each powerful in its own way. Very often developers choose to combine them and utilize their benefits to the greatest extent.

Another thing to keep in mind when you are choosing between a control suite or reporting solution for a feature is the development approach. By using a control suite, you are expected to write code to implement the desired look and behavior. By using a reporting solution, development could be easier and more visual. With Reporting, for most of the reports you will not have to write any code. Telerik Reporting also gives business users the ability to create new reports or edit the existing ones as they desire using the Standalone Report Designer. Using a control suite also typically targets only one technology, be it Windows Forms, WPF, or ASP.NET. By utilizing a reporting solution, you can implement the reports once, and use them in all those technologies.

Leverage on a specific use case, and decide what fits it best—a reporting solution or control suite. Both have one very common advantage—they are specially created to fulfill any developer's need. So, enjoy them to the maximum!

If you're curious to learn more about Reporting or want to start a free trial and see if it works for you, just click here.

With the R2 release of Progress Telerik, we're going back to our roots—we're giving you the tools you need to be the best possible .NET ninja.

The sun is shining. The weather is warming up. The flowers are blooming. The birds are chirping. Yep, it is summer time for most of the world, so step out and enjoy the great outdoors. Unless, of course, you are in Australia—but then you’re probably already brave enough to fight off the wilderness and get plenty of outdoor time regardless.

We're hoping the R2 release of Progress Telerik will help you get out of your cubicle a bit and enjoy the great summer weather. We know that to deliver your awesome software projects on time and delight your users, you need cutting-edge developer tooling. You need tooling that will elevate your development experience and enable you to deliver solutions faster.

No matter your app platform—mobile, web or desktop—this R2 release will help you improve the way you operate. We’re getting back to our roots and making the best .NET tooling for .NET ninjas, like yourself. Your success is our business.

Relive the Content

On May 25, Progress Developer Advocates John Bristowe, Ed Charbeneau and Sam Basu unpacked the Telerik  R2 release with a developer’s perspective on the juicy new bits. Yes, there were slides, but the demo gods were happy with us as well. If you had joined us for the release webinar, a sincere thank you! If you missed it, you can relive the webinar in all its glory via this high-definition recording.

Prize Winners

What’s a Progress webinar without some awesome prizes? Our first gadget pick this time was the Amazon Echo—because life gets lonely without Alexa.

And the winner for the best question goes to Chris Sutton!

Our next gadget giveaway was the Parrot Bebop 2 Drone—because geeks dig aerial photography in HD.

And the winner is Duane Moore—you win just for showing up.

Congrats winners. Hope you enjoy your prizes!

Additional Question & Answers

One of the most enjoyable aspects of our webinars is the audience interaction and Q&A all throughout. 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: Are the ASP.NET UI widgets shown available for both MVC & Core?
A: Yes. The TagHelpers are exclusive to UI for ASP.NET Core, but all widgets are available for MVC as well.

Q: How do we prevent freezing of a UI grid with unlimited data while binding?
A: First, you should always be conscious of the amount of client-side data you bind to UI grids. Having said that, most of our Grids (ASP.NET, UWP, WPF, etc.) do virtualization and smart data binding through lazy loading. Check this out.

Q: Is there RTL support in Kendo UI?
A: Yes, both Kendo UI for jQuery and Kendo UI for Angular support RTL features.

Q: When will Kendo UI for MVC support the Scaffolder Wizard within Visual Studio 2017? I still keep VS2015 in addition to VS2017 just for this purpose alone.
A: The Scaffolding Wizard is already available for VS2017 when using UI for ASP.NET MVC. If you're not seeing this functionality, try updating to the latest release.

Q: With Kendo UI, do I now have to choose between jQuery and Angular?
A: Nope, technology stack is entirely your call based on your expertise and type of app you are building. We want to enable you to render sharp UI no matter your approach—hence, the choices in Kendo UI.

Q: Can more than one signatory sign a PDF?
A: RadPdfProcessing currently supports only signing of a single signature field. Signing more than one signature field will result in invalidation of all signatures except the last one.

Q: Is there a big gap between Kendo UI ABL vs .NET in term of features/support?  We are working in an ABL environment but we are looking toward .NET for new apps.
A: Perhaps a bit in tooling, but we've worked hard to bridge that gap. Check this.

Q: Can I use different map providers with the Kendo UI Map control?
A: Yes, check this.

Q: I do not see a way to adjust anything but colors in the WPF Theme Generator and the MaterialPalette class has nothing related to margin or padding.
A: Customize the control template instead, like here.

Q: Are the shapes for the rating control in UI for Xamarin a fixed set or are they customizable?
A: There are several pre-defined shapes, but you can also customize. Check this.

Q: Is online documentation updated for all .NET products shown?
A: Yes, docs are updated the day of the release and reflect latest bits.

Q: Get Out! Your Ninja Skills are sweet. How are we going to justify the ‘long time’ it takes to develop complex UI functionality ever again?
A: We have teams of smart engineers working non-stop to produce these UI controls, so you can focus on solving real-world problems. Enjoy!

Q: Is John Bristowe a cyborg?
A: Close—he’s Canadian.

Appreciate the Love

Hosting webinars is hard work. But we do it because we’re excited about our releases and want fellow developers to be successful. We always appreciate your kind words and strive to make your lives even easier as developers. Here’s some love:

• https://twitter.com/temeschede/status/867761866084429824
• https://twitter.com/LBlumenfeld/status/867762616189538307
• https://twitter.com/BrianWright/status/867762490276552704
• https://twitter.com/easyprotechnlgy/status/867771636719779841
• https://twitter.com/easyprotechnlgy/status/867764378870976515
• https://twitter.com/aharmsdev/status/867759904966270976

Resources

There are tons of things to point out, but it is often best to start at the product pages. From there, you can drill down to UI features, demos and docs. So here goes:

• Webinar Recording
• Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC
• Telerik UI for ASP.NET Core
• Telerik UI for ASP.NET Ajax
• Kendo UI
• Telerik UI for Xamarin
• Telerik UI for UWP
• Telerik UI for WPF

That’s a Wrap

With Microsoft’s renewed mojo and cross-platform tooling, this is probably one of the best times to be a .NET developer. Your professional apps need polished modern UI though—stop reinventing the wheel and ship your apps faster.

Progress Telerik .NET tools are here to help, providing you with a rich complete .NET UI toolkit and frameworks for all applications, including web, desktop and mobile. Hope we have given you plenty of ammunition with this R2 2017 release to go build amazing apps. Stay classy and have fun coding! 

New updates are here in UI for WinForms, including improved mapping, calendars, text editing and more.

As usual, in the service release we kept our attention on the feedback that came from you, our customers. We’ve made a number of improvements across the whole suite. We also got some of our clients involved in the development process through early feature preview for the ones that participated in the feature discussions in the feedback portal. For a full list of the changes head over to the release notes.

RadMap

RadMap now can show three new imagery sets provided by the Bing Maps REST service, namely Canvas Dark, Canvas Light and Canvas Gray.

In addition, the KML reader for RadMap can now load image files stored on the local machine.

RadCalendar

You can now select the whole row or column in RadCalendar by clicking on the header of the corresponding row or column. We also unified the behavior when clicking on a header cell so it would extend the current selection instead of replacing it.

RadScheduler

We have worked on the performance of the RadScheduler and there are several improvements in the binding mechanism when working in an OpenEdge environment as well as when using Entity Framework. There are also some tweaks that will make the timeline view work faster when working with a small custom scale.

RadPdfViewer

We have added two events that will make working with individual pages much easier. PageBeginRender and PageEndRender allow you to take action while the page is being rendered.

RadGridView

If you have many columns in your RadGridView you most certainly use the Column Chooser. Now we have added a neat filter text box that will allow you to narrow down the columns to just the one(s) you are looking for.

RichTextEditor

The spell-checking functionality of the RadRichTextEditor is great but, as with any piece of software, it is not correct 100% of the time. Therefore, we have added a text box that will give you the final word in the correction process.

Share Your Feedback

Your feedback helps us keep making our products better and more aligned with your needs, so we want to hear your opinions. Let us know what you think in the comments below, or over on our feedback portal.

Our VirtualGrid is faster and analytics services integration is built-in, plus more improvements in the latest release of UI for WPF.

The R2 2017 Service Pack release of Telerik UI for WPF and Telerik UI for Silverlight is already live, and it is packed up with lots of updates and features.

We have prepared a quick summary of what is new and what the major updates are in both of the suites.

VirtualGrid Optimizations

You might already have seen our newest gem, we introduced with last official release (R2 2017) of Telerik UI for WPF—RadVirtualGrid. The control is still in development (beta), however it is getting faster and better. With this service pack we have updated the virtualization engine, so it now it consumes significantly less memory and included the following major fixes:

• ArgumentException is thrown when the available Height/Width of the CompoundPanel is less than the total Height/Width of all pinned containers
• PushCellValue method does not work if there is no current cell

The official version of the control is scheduled for next major release of the WPF suite (R3 2017), so any feedback regarding the current state of the component is highly appreciated. You could let us know about any issues you have found and/or any features you might need through our Feedback portal.

Built-in Analytics Services Integration in the UI for WPF/Silverlight Controls

We know that integrating an analytics service in a newly developed application is a must. That is why we exposed our TraceMonitor class and ITraceMonitor interface, so you can benefit from them and use our current tracking implementation with the analytic service provider of your choice. For example, you could easily track some of the major custom events of our most popular controls. More details regarding the exact implementation and the full list of the traceable features in UI for WPF can be found in the Application Analytics article.

Other Improvements

As usual, with this release you should expect numerous improvements in our most used controls. We included many important fixes for RadGridView, RadChartView, RadRichTextBox as well as improvements in our brand new Material theme. You can find full list of all the fixes and improvements here.

Share Your Feedback

Feel free to drop us a comment below sharing your thoughts. Or visit our Feedback portals about UI for WPF/Silverlight and Document Processing Libraries and let us know if you have any suggestions or if you need any particular features/controls.

Try out the latest:

UI for WPF  UI for Silverlight

Our latest update upgrades the performance of our open-source UI for UWP controls, boosting Chart by 50% and ListView by 30%.

Speed is one of the targets that every developer strives for when building their application. Providing a fast-rendering and smooth-scrolling application will definitely win the heart of every user that decides to use your application. 

With the R2 2017 service pack update for Progress Telerik UI for UWP, we have focused on boosting the performance of two of our most used controls from the suite—the Chart and ListView. 

Let me provide you with some more information on how much faster RadChart and RadListView have become with our latest improvements.

RadChart ♥ Composition API

The Composition API provides a unified compositor and rendering engine for all UWP applications, and we have integrated it in some of the visual elements of our UWP Chart—for example the Axis, the BarSeries, the Financial indicators, etc. You can find a full list of all the visual elements that are rendered through the Composition API here.

The usage of the Composition API in our Chart lowers CPU usage by about 50% compared with the previous implementation.

Old Rendering Performance

New Rendering Perfromance

RadListView Performance Improvements

Performance improvements have been introduced for the ListView control as well. The re-ordering of the items has been slightly optimized. Some of the visual elements of the RadListViewItem have been reduced. Finally, optimizations have been made for the swipe and drag handlers of the control—now they are loaded only on demand. As a result the performance of the ListView has improved up to 30% compared to the previous implementation.

Share Your Feedback

If you haven’t done it yet, check out the open source UI for UWP project where we invite you to share your feedback with us. Feel free to contribute as well—we highly appreciate any contribution that helps us improve the controls.

Download on Github

You can now easily view live data with ChartView, and experience up to a 10 time improvement in ListView. Read on to see all our latest UI for Xamarin updates.

Stable and reliable performance for your mobile applications—this is a key part of our mission when we deliver our UI for Xamarin components. That's why we work to continuously improve their performance in a number of different scenarios. In this R2 service pack release, we focused on achieving the most reliable performance with ChartView and ListView for the scenarios described below:

ChartView—Live Data

Visualizing live data requires a stable and performant chart component. With this SP release, we have introduced significant performance improvements in our Android and iOS charts, so now you can display live updates in your mobile app. The image above shows our Android chart displaying five line series with 100 items each, receiving updates rapidly.

ListView—Loading, Sorting, Filtering

For ListView, the most used control in the suite, we worked the last several weeks to give you even better performance for the initial load, grouping and sorting in Android. The tests we performed showed improvements in data operations by 7-10 times. We have also improved the overall scrolling performance by minimizing JNI native calls and smart caching on Drawables used for ListView items.

For UWP we have improved initial load time by around 30% using lazy loading practices such as deferred XAML loading for some of the elements.

Learn More and Share Your Feedback

We didn’t forget about the rest of components—we added improvements to TabView, Calendar, AutoComplete, BusyIndicator and DataForm. You can read about all the improvements we've made in our Release History. You can also find more tips & tricks on how to use the controls in our Documentation, at the SDK demos and at the Telerik Developer Network.

Curious to measure the performance of your app with the update? Go ahead and download UI for Xamarin, try it out and let us know how it went, along with any other feedback you might have.

Download UI for Xamarin

We recently kicked off our "Kendo UI DevChat" series on web development. If you missed it, check out the replay as we answer questions we couldn't get to live.

This week saw the first installation of our "Kendo UI DevChat" series aimed at tackling important topics around web development with a hands-on, code-only, presentation style. This first webinar was a session on best practices around building user-friendly forms with Angular. While focusing specifically on Google's Angular framework, all of these best practices can be implemented in any web form and could work across server-side (ASP.NET Ajax, ASP.NET MVC, JSP, etc.) and client-side implementations (jQuery, ReactJS, VueJS, EmberJS, Aurelia, etc.) alike. I wanted to summarize the event in a blog post to not only share the recording and project we created but also answer some questions that came through.

Webinar Recording & Sample Project

If you were unable to join me for the live webinar, or just wanted to see it all again (who wouldn't!?) we have the recording right here on our YouTube channel.

As for the sample project, you can find it right here on GitHub.

Questions and Answers

There were a ton of questions asked during the webinar but I wanted to highlight a few of them here since I think anyone that has watched the webinar will find them useful.

Which version of Angular and Angular Forms was this?
This particular webinar used Angular 4.2.2. The package.json for the solution has set up the Angular reference as "^4.0.0" so it should remain within 4.x.

Will this work with reactive forms?
First off, in case you're not familiar with Angular's reactive forms, here's a quick link to the Angular documentation. While what we did during the webinar was an example of a template-driven form, all of the best practices we brought up in the webinar will work for any type of approach to creating forms. So, with some tweaks to the approach (to make it reactive) we can still re-use most of the code from the webinar.

Are there best practices for what to do once a form is submitted? E.g. going to a new screen, popup message, etc.
We did just take a look at the form portion during the webinar and the answer becomes "it depends." This form could have already been in a popup, or maybe it was just a sign-up form. What to do next pretty much depends on the application requirements, but I would say that transitioning to the next screen is probably the most logical. If you want to have a success message I encourage that to be under the button area with green text stating success, then moving on to the next screen. A popup to declare success is too distracting.

What is your approach for nested forms validation using Template Forms you used?
Nested forms would most likely involve another Angular component rather than having a single overly-complicated component. We can then do validation within each of the components independently. Also, since we are doing validation on a field-by-field basis (rather than the full model upon submit) this also reduces complexity of validation in this case. Absolute worst-case scenario, if you need to communicate between two components, you can set something up in your service layer to deal with the communication.

If this would be a child component. How would you respond back to the parent component? What's the best practice to use this within another component?
The above question is pretty much related here. For any communication between Component A and Component B in Angular one should work with the service layer to push information back and forth. Rather than passing information from parent to child (or vice versa) I would suggest having the parent send information to the service layer and have the child pull data from there. You can of course pass data between components directly if need be. This documentation article in the official Angular docs dives more into this topic.

What is the best practice to set fixed height for validation (error) message? So that it doesn't move all elements below it.
This is something that I did not do in the webinar, but it's a great idea and I wish I had included it! Yes, not making the form elements move around is also a great practice in forms. Any kind of movement or shift in elements placement can be distracting to the user.

Are there other k-classes for laying out labels to the left?
Yes! Instead of using "k-form" we can use "k-form-inline." There's even more classes to use for forms so I recommend reading over the Kendo UI for Angular Form documentation section for more information.

How heavy this application becomes at the end with all those libraries loaded?

While yes, I did leverage Kendo UI for styling for my form elements, I did only include two actual widgets, the DatePicker and the Switch. For everything else I was merely using CSS classes to help improve the look and feel—even with the form layout! So, we're not really adding any bloat to the project since we're working with CSS classes to spruce things up a bit.

When we start working with more advanced components and Kendo UI we don't have to worry, because Kendo UI supports Ahead-of-Time (AoT) Compilation and Tree Shaking to reduce page bloat.

What IDE you are using and how we can leverage the Kendo UI components in this IDE
For this demo, I was using Atom, but you can use just about any IDE out there to work with Angular and Kendo UI. Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Sublime; really any text editor can work with these technologies.

New features, a Material theme, bug fixes and more are here in the latest update to Reporting and Report Server.

We are excited to bring you the last service pack releases for Progress Telerik Reporting and Report Server. Most of the included bug fixes were reported from customers or with high priority. In addition to bug fixes, the Service Pack contains the WPF Report Viewer Material theme, and support for native promises in HTML5 Report Viewer.

In this blog post I will elaborate on the important improvements and bug fixes we have introduced in the 2017 R2 SP1 release. 

HTML5 Report Viewer 

The HTML5 Report Viewer now uses the browser's native implementation for promises. When the browser does not support promises the viewer automatically loads a promise polyfill. The users can replace the default polyfill with another one of their choice. 

The switch from jQuery promises to native promises or polyfills enabled us to improve the error handling of the viewer and its behavior when using an authentication token. 

In addition, it is now possible to modify the used authentication token at run-time via the new authenticationToken(token) method provided by the viewer widget. 

Desktop Viewers

To enable dialogless printing and per report printer settings, we have exposed PrinterSettings and PrintController to the WPF and Windows Forms viewers PrintBegin event. 

WPF Report Viewer

The Reporting WPF report viewer supports all the themes included in the Telerik UI for WPF. In this release, we are introducing the latest touch-friendly, smooth and animated theme following the Material design guidelines.

CSV Data Source Wizard

Now you can easily add CSV source files with relative paths. The wizard will automatically determine if the provided path from FileOpen dialog can be converted to a relative one, and if applicable, convert it. We have also added an option to roll back to the original absolute path.

Crystal Reports Converter 

Crystal Reports converter can now be used for batch reports conversion with the exposed API. Once the reports are converted they can be opened in the Standalone Report Designer for fine tuning. 

For a detailed list of all the fixes check out the release notes pages: 

Telerik Report Server R2 2017 SP1  

What's Coming Next in R3

Just to note that for R3 2017 we are working on some very exciting and highly desired improvements to Reporting and Report Server. This includes a major Reporting engine redesign to enable utilization of multiple CPU cores, and drastically reducing the memory footprint. In addition, we will make the HTML5 Report Viewer and its wrappers fully accessibility compliant. For Report Server, we are planning to isolate the reports data layer on the server—this way the Standalone Report Designer users will access the data definition through the Report Server and will not need special access privileges to the data source to author reports.

Share Your Feedback

Let us know how you'll be using the new functionality and what you're looking for in the future by leaving a comment below, or heading over to the feedback portal for Reporting and Report Server. As we mentioned above, we want to make your lives easier and feedback from our users drives our roadmap, so please share your feedback.