Announcing a new product line - Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

It is a great pleasure to announce our new product line - Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. As the name suggest we are building a new UI component suite targeting the ASP.NET MVC framework. The new product line will not be based on RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax nor will it depend on ASP.NET Ajax or ASP.NET WebForms. No page lifecycle, ScriptManager dependency, viewstate or postback . And did I mention that it would be FREE?

Free and Open Source

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC is available as an open source product under the Ms-PL license. For the first time Telerik will be releasing a free and open source product. The code can be used, modified and redistributed. You can even start your own open source project built upon Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. Go check the codeplex project.

For those of you not willing to use open source code in their commercial applications or in need of dedicated Telerik customer support we will offer a commercial license as well. However the current preview release is available only under the Ms-PL license.

Based on jQuery

We are adopting jQuery as our primary client-side framework and will build exclusively on top of it. Not only that - we are providing a sample class library which offers a few server-side components based on jQuery UI. This serves as a proof of concept for our server-side framework. The client-side and theming are from the jQuery UI suite - without any modification. We are currently focused on building our home-grown UI components which will not be based on jQuery UI. Those will be live with the future releases of Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC.

What's included

Today we are officially releasing the first CTP of Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. It includes the following unique features

• Rich server side framework for developing view components with fluent interface.
• Rich web asset management - you can register, combine, cache and compress JavaScript and CSS files.
• Tested with the default view engine, Spark and NHaml - sample projects are included.
• Sample class library based on Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC and jQuery UI - provides Accordion, DatePicker, MessageBox, ProgressBar, Tab and Slider components.
• All of this comes with full source code and unit tests!

Links

Here are some links related with the release:

• To download the bits please log in telerik.com
• You can check the online demos of the jQuery UI components at http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc
• We have prepared some documentation to get you started. Check it out at http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-mvc/ (still not live at the time of publishing this post)
• The codeplex project is http://telerikaspnetmvc.codeplex.com/
• And finally please give us your feedback in the forums - http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/aspnet-mvc/general.aspx

What's next

For the official release for Q3 2009 we will include the following home-grown UI components:

• Grid - a kick-ass grid built entirely with the MVC paradigm in mind. We will not make you pollute your controller with UI related logic.
• Menu - fast and lightweight menu component
• TabStrip - tabstrip component

All components will be based on jQuery, render lightweight output and provide great extensibility and Telerik's well known visual appearance.

So let us know what you think! Post your feedback in the forum.