Boyko Markov's blog

The Excellence of RadMaskedEditBox

Boyko Markov — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:00:00 GMT

A lot of time passed since my last post , and lot of things have changed and were added to our unique RadControls for WinForms offer. Today, I'd like to direct the spotlight at RadMaskedEditBox for WinForms, which offers some pretty impressive functionality you will find useful in your applications.

While using a text box control for text input and editing is quite familiar, such a component has simplified user interface and poor feature set. However because of the popularity we implemented the RadTextBox component. When we finished this control, there were voices from the community that said: "Hey we want a text box control with enhancements for optional masked input and formatted input, but we want it to include the feature set of RadTextBox".
It's always like this: Whatever the planning and the research regarding the features set of a component, the community folks have ingenious ideas that have slipped past our eyes and ears without being noticed. And what we certainly do here at Telerik is not just listening but hearing our community.
Multiple requests were the reason we've started the development of a masked edit control. The first version we released was with two types of editing - Standard and DateTime. Let me clear a bit what "Standard type" really means:

When you define an input mask using the Mask property then each character is mapped to a placeholder or a literal (alphabetic or punctual characters) character. Example are the parentheses surrounding the area code of a phone number: (041). This behavior of our mask edit control is called standard because it is the same as it is in the mask box component provided with .NET 2.0.

The DateTime mask on the other hand ensures that the date entered by the user is verified and accurate. You can also specify the culture information by setting the Culture property of the control. Keyboard support is also included. You can switch between different values in the date by using the arrow keys or typing some numbers. Left, Right arrow keys are moving the focus left or right thus selecting a part of a date (e.g. year). Up, Down
arrow keys are spinning up or down the current selected date part( e.g. If you have currently selected the year and its value is 2008, when you press the up arrow the year value will be changed to 2009).

I'm happy to announce that in the Q1 release of RadControls for WinForms one more type of editing behavior was added to RadMaskedEditBox. Now users can edit currency, percentage, and numeric (floating-point or decimal) values. This could be done very easily by just specifying the correct mask. Examples for such masks are: 'f' - floating-point, 'p' - percentage, 'c' - currency, etc.

That's all folks for now, but, hey, stay tuned as I will be blogging about the RadDateTimePicker and its dozens of features.

The New RadPanelBar for WinForms

Boyko Markov — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

About a year ago my team leader asked me to write a control which mimics the behavior of Telerik RadPanelBar for ASP.NET.

I had just finished the development of RadToolStrip so I though "Hmm, a panelbar for WinForms. It shouldn't be too big of a deal. There is no dragging of toolStripItems, there are no floating forms, the add/remove should be easy to do, etc. But it turned out that it was a bit harder to do than I anticipated. Several issues popped up shortly after the Q1 2007 release, mostly related to performance and to controls being hosted in the panelbar.

So I decided to review the control and improve its usability for Q3 2007. I noticed several things I did not like in my code. Back then I was a new face in Telerik, and although I have a strong development background, I had little experience with controls and components. Looking at my code now I started to realize how much I have learned in this past year! Many methods were not properly implemented, there was obscure code, and the whole product seemed like an afterthought. At the same time there were some very cool things about it - the themes were nice and could be reused, the API seemed to be in place, and the documentation was there as well!
After discussing this with the team we decided to start over, from scratch, but with the new layouts we have been working on. I have kept the old API for backwards compatibility, as well as the old themes which were indeed very good.
After a month of intense development I am happy to introduce the new version of our RadPanelBar control! We implemented the new layouts which brought major performance improvements in expanding/collapsing RadPanelBarGroupElements, as well as to resizing when using the grip in Outlook style panelbar. I added several self-explanatory new events to provide our customers with some extra flexibility:

PanelBarGroupExpanded
PanelBarGroupExpanding
PanelBarGroupSelected
PanelBarGroupSelecting
PanelBarGroupCollapsed
PanelBarGroupCollapsing
PanelBarGroupUnSelected
PanelBarGroupUnSelecting

�

All visual glitches that came from scrolling have been removed and scrolling with hosted controls now works in Explorer Bar and VS2005 styles. Design-time support has been enhanced and is much more intuitive. And finally, I had some time to enhance the themes:

There are just a few breaking changes in the property/method names, but switching to the new version should be an easy task.
I'll be happy to hear your feedback and will welcome any suggestions you may have on improving the new RadPanelBar for WinForms.

RadControls for WinForms last minute controls

Boyko Markov — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:27:00 GMT

RadControls for WinForms Q2 is live! It has been exhaustive, but motivating 4 months since the last major release and I am very happy to announce the new version of our innovative Windows Forms components.
As I had promised the last time, I will be providing you with interesting and helpful information about the WinForms suite. With Q2 out of the door, I will turn to two of the basic controls which we have included in this release, literally at the last moment, namely RadBreadCrumb and RadDateTimePicker.
RadBreadCrumb is a navigation control directly related to the well-known to the community RadTreeView for WinForms. Its purpose is to show the path to the selected instance of RadTreeNode.

The most important property of RadBreadCrumb is the DefaultTreeView property. It is used to bind the bread crumb with an instance of RadTreeView on the same form.
The following code demonstrates how to initialize the RadBreadCrumb component:
this.radBreadCrumb1.DefaultTreeView = this.radTreeView1;
The breadcrumb's structure is changing dynamically when you select a node in the binded RadTreeView. We can also select a node in the treeview using the breadcrumb by just clicking on some of its items.
You can find an example of the RadBreadCrumb in our Vista File Explorer:

RadDateTimePicker is the second last-minute control we have added to the suite. This control comes as a bonus and demonstrates our willingness to deliver more than expected. Its API closely resembles the one of its Microsoft counterpart, however with one main difference: RadDateTimePicker does not support masked edit in this version. In fact the text field is in a "read-only" state for the time being until the component is introduced officially (the next quarter release). With the next version of the component you will have a fully featured date and time picker at your disposal.

Have fun with the new RadControls for WinForms!

Have real fun with RadCalendar for WinForms

Boyko Markov — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:20:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Let me take the opportunity to introduce myself to the Telerik community - my name is Boyko Markov and I'm a lead developer for the RadCalendar WinForms component that will be officially introduced in our Q2 release.

I will do my best to post interesting ideas and helpful information on RadCalendar and few other controls, including the upcoming RadDateTimePicker control.

Telerik RadCalendar for Windows Forms.

The newest addition to the RadControls for WinForms suite is Telerik RadCalendar for WinForms - a control we kept in secret up until now. We decided to keep it a secret not only to surprise you with its release, but because we did not know that it will be so easy to be built using the innovative Telerik Presentation Framework for WinForms, and the API of RadCalendar for ASP.NET. Basically, we did not think that we will manage to pull this off for this release.

Development turned out to be a breeze, mostly because RadCalendar for WinForms uses the familiar API of its ASP.NET counterpart. What this means for you? Well, if you are familiar with our web calendar, chances are that you will experience flat learning curve and increased productivity.

Of course, there are some differences in styling - we use the theming mechanism of RadControls for WinForms instead of the style objects used in RadCalendar for ASP.NET. In my opinion, the theming mechanism of RadControls for WinForms gives you greater flexibility, because you can practically change and tune every and each property of the component. But you still get all required functionality by a calendar control - multiple month views, globalization, localization, fast navigation, RTL support, and rich styling with visual effects.

What is better is that you get some brand new visuals, such as Zooming (Fish Eye behavior), Rendering Direction, and Multiple Month View.

A nice feature in the first version of RadCalendar is the Rendering direction. It allows for presentation of all types of artistic calendars - the calendric information can be presented in rows and/or in columns.

With RadCalendar one can render row by row or column by column.

Other cool features are:

•    Multi-month view

•    Vertical and horizontal rendering - month days can be rendered row by row, or column by column
•    Multi-date selection
•    Advanced navigation - fast navigation with a step greater than 1, multi-month view navigation
•    Read-only mode
•    Allows embedding images and templates (RadHostItem instances)
•    Full Globalization and Localization support - supports all .NET cultures and allows localization of strings
•    Simple read-only datepicker
•    Full VS2005 design time support
•    Right to left language support

It's real fun to work with RadCalendar as its API is very convenient and intuitive. It will be available and fully operational in our Beta release today.