We just shipped the beta of the Q2 2010 release. Download instructions for the beta can be found in the announcement forum thread. Why a beta when other Telerik products had their betas a month ago? We decided to postpone the official release of Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC so we can deliver … three five new components! The official release would ship later this summer.

New Components

Telerik Editor for ASP.NET MVC

In its first release the editor will contain only the most necessary text editing tools. We aim to keep it small thus more complex tools (image manager, table wizard etc) will be released as external plugins in the releases to come. We also aim at producing the same valid XHTML in all supported browsers. Telerik Editor for ASP.NET MVC is inspired by Microsoft Word and we really put a lot of effort to provide similar user experience.

Telerik ComboBox for ASP.NET MVC

This actually includes three components – ComboBox, DropDownList and AutoComplete. Why three you may ask. Each of those components servers a different purpose (also note the different looks):

• The dropdownlist is a skinned equivalent of the Html.DropDownList() which happens to support ajax and web service binding.
  
• The combobox has all the features of the dropdownlist plus the important fact that the end user can input a value which is not present it the item list. Additionally the combobox can filter its items based on the typed value.
  
• The autocomplete is a Html.TextBox() with the added feature to suggest a list of values. It also filters those values based on the user input and the end user can pick more than one value. Remember the “To …”  textbox in Microsoft Outlook"? That’s exactly how Telerik AutoComplete for ASP.NET MVC behaves.
   
  The complete feature matrix of the combobox-like components can be found in the Combobox Introduction help topic.

Telerik Window for ASP.NET MVC

The window supports animation, resizing, drag and drop – all the stuff you would expect from a decent window component. Plus it is is used the editor and grid (read ahead).

New Features

Popup and form editing mode for Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC

The grid now supports popup:

and in-forms editing modes:

Master / Detail (a.k.a. hierarchy) support for Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC

The grid now allows you to define a detail template. This helps you implement hierarchy:

and master / detail:

Column resizing support for Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC
 
Other improvements in Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC

Those include:

• The ability to define the columns from the controller
• Client side number formatting. You can now specify the format for number columns and it will work in client binding modes (web service and ajax)
• Lots of bugfixes

As usual we have provided full release notes.

Please let us know what you think of the beta!