ASP.NET Web Forms Devs: Here's What to Expect from Telerik for Q1 2015

The roadmap for the upcoming Q1 2015 release of Telerik® UI for ASP.NET AJAX is ready, and I want to share the highlights with you:

Stability

One of our main goals for 2015 will be to make the suite as bug-free as possible. For Q1 2015, we will spend more time reducing the critical bugs, followed by fixes in the most popular controls.

New Bootstrap Skin

The new modern skin will feature design and metrics similar to the default ones of the Bootstrap components. This ensures that the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX components will fit better alongside the Bootstrap widgets, on the same page.

You can configure the new skin using the Visual Style Builder, which can match any Bootstrap skin you want to use in your apps. Bootstrap offers a couple of different metrics, so you should be able to create skins for each of them.

Visual Style Builder Updates

There are three major tasks planned for the skin creation tool:

• Ability to create skins for Lightweight render mode of the controls.
• Advanced customization options for the new Bootstrap and other skins.
• Update the list of controls. (Right now, it still misses the new introduced with the Q3 release.)

Better Getting Started Experience

We want to make your life easier, and we plan to improve the following Getting Started resources:

• Visual Studio Templates: You will be able to choose among the predefined templates from the New Project/Website creation dialogs of Visual Studio, which will automatically generate a masterpage and а webform inside your project. For version one, we will offer four templates with responsive web design, thanks to the Page Layout control and different layouts based on RadMenu, RadGrid and RadTreeList.
  
  
• New Quick Start Framework (a.k.a. the demos’ app): The Framework’s main focus is the controls and their presentation. Тhe new responsive layout is clean and clear with no additional design elements such as aggressive colors, backgrounds, gradients or 3D effects, so that the demo and the control itself visually stand out on the page and you can interact with them easily. Additionally, every demo offers better UX due to the unified layout: demo -> configurator -> description and source code. All demos of one type (keyboard navigation, accessibility, mobile support, render mode and so on) follow the same layout structure, and the user can easily separate them from the other demos.
  
  
   
• Improved Client-Side API Articles: The information will be updated for consistency. All API tables will contain columns for parameters and return types.

Mobile Support

• Adaptive RadEditor: The rich text editor will become adaptive, and the layout and dimensions of its tools and content area will change according to the device upon which it’s displayed.
• Scalable controls: The ColorPicker, Input, OrgChart, Progress Area, Rating, Scheduler, Spell, TabStrip, Ticker and TileList will become elastic, which means that you can scale the control dimensions by simply changing the default font size.

Lightweight Rendering

The modern semantic lightweight rendering is very important, because it optimizes the control’s loading speed and makes the customization of its appearance much easier. The controls that will obtain lightweight rendering in Q3 are:

• Lightweight Grid: The semantic rendering based on HTML and CSS3 will reduce the amount of markup the control renders and make it easier to customize. The reduced markup and use of font icons instead of sprite images will decrease the overall grid size and skin complexity, including custom skins.
• Other controls: Button, ColorPicker, Input, OrgChart, Progress Area, Rating and TabStrip.

Other Improvements to the Existing Controls

• Grid:
  • BIFF export, support for binary images
  • Provide an option to change the default encoding for CSV export
  • Frozen columns with next/prev buttons
• Gantt: Resources, tooltip and current date indicator
• Diagram: The control will become official and will offer highly requested features such as export, containers, text formatting and wrapping
• DataForm: Client-side Binding and client-side API
• ImageGallery: Support for templates and gestures