Telerik AJAX Q3 2011 Beta - New Org Chart and Social Share controls, Metro skin and more

The final major release of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX for this year brings new controls, embedded Metro skin and a plethora of new features for the existing controls to the table. The Q3 2011 Beta preview which has just been uploaded on the site (both for TRIAL and COMMERCIAL users) grants a direct access to the pre-release bits to play with them at your disposal. Read on to learn more about the Beta:

Org Chart | Social Share | Metro Skin | Items drag and drop on mobile

The Premium Telerik AJAX component set grows with a couple more controls - Org Chart and Social Share.

• Org Chart - organization chart control with flexible rendering capabilities (rendered fields, templates, grouping in nodes, etc.), xml export/import functionality and data-binding to a variety of data sources.
  
  
  
  
  See Demos
• Social Share - intuitively configurable widget for effortless content sharing via different social networks. Easy to be configured and customized, with multi-tracker Google Analytics support and optional 'Send email' form.
  
  
  
  See Demos

In addition, we are shipping a new Metro skin modeled on par with the Metro design guidelines and part of the new Telerik.Web.UI.Skins assembly, introduced in Q2 2011. Furthermore, an official coverage for the latest versions of the FireFox and Chrome browsers as well as FIPS support is delivered. On top of that, now you can drag and drop grid, listview, treelist and treeview items on mobile touch-enabled devices, with the scheduler following them for the official Q3'11 release.

Finally, we introduce a very handy design-time feature for our AJAX controls in VS 2008/2010, i.e. the ability to auto-attach client event handlers by selecting a new or existing handler method for this purpose:

New features for existing components

Grid group header/footer templates and performance optimizations - our leading AJAX web grid gets one more functionality to its feature arsenal: group header/footer templates. Moreover, the grid grouping performance has been vastly improved in a variety of scenarios. In some of them the performance boost leads to 10x to 100x faster loading times, or even more! Stay tuned for a separate blog post on this subject in the upcoming weeks.

See Demo

Editor Insert video url dialog and RibbonBar toolbar modes - the editor control receives handy insert video url dialog that allows you to configure how the video will be visualized and played in the editor content area (in terms of aspect ratio, dimensions, etc.). RibbonBar toolbar modes are introduced with this release as well.

See Demo

Image Editor features - the AJAX image editor introduced in the previous Q2 2011 release accommodates several new features, such as insert image in image, toolbar modes, zoom edited image with mouse wheel, keyboard support, enhanced accessibility, etc.

See Demos

Drag and drop upload - our AsyncUpload now allows multiple file upload with drag and drop on browsers which already support this feature (like the newest versions of FireFox and Chrome).

See Demo

RibbonBar features - the AJAX RibbonBar now incorporates contextual tabs, quick access toolbar and very neat keyboard support.

See Demos

Keyboard support and PDF export for TreeList - two major features for the TreeList control that augment its accessibility and provide the option to export its structure in PDF format.

See Demos 

Button template - a brand new RadButton functionality that allows you to define it in a complete custom manner by means of a template container.

See Demo

SharePoint 2010 Web Parts updates

The SharePoint 2010 AJAX web parts we have are not left overlooked in this release, too. SPRadGrid supports more content types and exposes public UI for save/restore grid settings on a per user basis. Additionally, the SPRadGrid and SPRadListView web parts binding is optimized to gain better performance and two new SPRadEditor live demos (for lists and web parts editing scenario) are added on our SharePoint 2010 demo site.

The Q3'11 live demos, documentation and release notes are available at:
Live Demos | Documentation | Release Notes

And if all this is not enough for you, we are saving a few more thrilling features for the official Q3 2011, down for mid November :) Until then we will be glad to hear your comments on the Q3 2011 Beta bits either by commenting this blog post or posting your feedback in the AJAX Q3 2011 Beta forum. We are all ears!

Are you into ASP.NET development? Download our AJAX and MVC components now to cut back development time and boost your productivity!