Check the early bits – the Q2’13 Beta for ASP.NET AJAX is now available

It’s release time again! All Developer Tools teams at Telerik are getting ready for the Q2 2013 official release and making last preparations to deliver what we promised. But how can we get ready without getting your feedback and showing the bits earlier in our Beta release? Let’s have a quick look at what’s new and exciting!

New Controls

TileList – Comes here to make the creation of Windows 8 Start Menu-like navigation easier with the tile types you need, such as a tile with text, image, both, icon or template. All having the ability to define peek templates displayed slick animations. You can define the tiles in groups and enable selection or make them navigate to a new page. And all this working on touch devices as well! Try the demos here.

New Features for Existing Controls

Light-weight rendering – We promised that we will utilize HTML5 and CSS3 some time ago. The benefits of this are multiple – less HTML is used to achieve the UI we have, less CSS and image resource are necessary to get the cool effects, which optimizes the controls’ performance and yours too, when it comes to creating new skins ;). The controls render a more sematic HTML which is better for accessibility and search engines. This new mode is enabled by setting the RenderMode property of the control to Light. And this changes only the rendering and the resources we use for skinning the controls. Other than this, the look and feel and all functionalities remain the same. With the last release this new rendering was supported by Telerik’s ComboBox for ASP.NET AJAX and with the Q2’13 Beta comes the support for our Form Decorator, Dock, Calendar, ToolTip, while the support for the Pop up Window will join the group with the official Q2’13 release.

Chart (HTML5) – New chart type is now added to our ASP.NET Chart based on HTML5 – the Candlestick and now you can bind reports with financial charts. Another new feature we added is something highly requested by you and I’m happy to share that we finally did it – the support for DateTime. Check it out on the demo or try it yourselves by downloading the Beta and let us know if you like it by leaving a comment below.

DropDownTree – Released a few months ago for the first time, the DropDownTree is getting more and more features. Now it comes with filtering and Web Service binding supporting regular ASP Web Services (asmx) and WCF Services. Client templates will enable you to build unique look and design for the tree nodes when the nodes are loaded on demand. What else from the requested features is here: the SelectedValue property is not only a getter anymore but is also a setter. New buttons are added (not visible by default but enabled with a single property each) – Clear and Check All to allow your users select all items faster and clear selection without unchecking each tree node one by one.

SearchBox – Define the SearchContext of the Search Box to allow the end-users to further specify the category they are searching for results in. This will enable a dropdown list before the search input with the available categories. Explore it here, I’m sure you’ll find it useful ;).

Image Editor – The tools within the Image Editor reached a critical mass for us to not include them in the default toolbar. With this release we have setup the toolbar to show the filters and drawing tools by default. We didn't stop with the improvements here. Now you can draw in RadImageEditor with much more control and flexibility. Once drawn, a figure can be moved around and its dimensions changed to your likings. Definitely give it a try.

Editor – There’s nothing new for our beloved rich text Editor for ASP.NET. Then why is it in this list? Well, because it got improved. The core of the commands for aligning elements to center, left or right, for indenting and outdenting content, the commands for list manipulation such as creating list from empty line, from block element, prepending elements to a list and so on are totally revamped. Now all this operations behave the same way in all browsers and lots of issues we previously had with them got fixed. And in our efforts to make the controls more stable than ever we were able to fix a lot more issues, but you can see it all in the release notes.

Grid – our Grid for ASP.NET is powered up with a new hierarchical load mode that’s a hybrid between the client and server-on-demand load modes. So what happens is that the first time an item is expanded, a call to the server is performed, from then on collapsing and expanding this item happens on the client. Another feature you can enable is the ExpandAll buttons for a hierarchical and/or grouped grid. I am happy to mention that we now have built-in batch editing, something requested multiple times the last few years. See how it works here.

I’ll stop here, but want to stress that this is not all and that there will be a few more interesting news with the Q2 2013 release itself which is due in less than a month.

Follow the Quick Links

To see the full list of the fixes and new features, check the Q2 2013 BETA release notes. To see how it works, play with the online demos. If you are eager to try it yourself, download RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX now.

Finally, don’t forget to share your feedback with us, either by leaving a comment here, or by contacting us though the Beta forum.