Visual Studio 2008 RTM is here and we have plenty of new things in RadControls for ASP.NET

As all of you are now aware that Visual Studio 2008 RTM has shipped I would shed more light on how this affects RadControls for ASP.NET in terms of new features and roadmap.

Needless to say, Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5 release is a key milestone for Telerik and we will make sure all customer requirements are covered with the new features of the IDE and framework. We have been testing RadControls compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 (codenamed "Orcas") since early builds of the IDE and the community is happy to see that RadControls are mostly working as expected (with a couple of minor exceptions which are not critical and will be fixed soon) in the new Visual Studio. Now that RTM is released, we are going through complete tests of all features - so far all RadControls behave as expected and we are not facing any major problems or limitations. Once the QA team is ready with the full report we will have an official compatibility announcement on the website. As we did with VS2005, we will have official support of VS2008 shortly after the IDE is publicly launched. (Our full VS2008-ready release is now scheduled for mid-December, which is about three weeks from today.)

These are the key points we will support with RadControls for ASP.NET (a full summary of what’s new in VS2008 and ASP.NET 3.5 is available on ScottGu’s blog):
* Most of these new features and improvements are already implemented in RadControls over the past couple of months when we’ve been following VS2008 Betas and RC.

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support
With VS 2008 you will be able to build applications targeting multiple versions of the .NET Framework. Apart from ASP.NET 3.5, VS 2008 can be used to open, edit and build existing ASP.NET 2.0 applications (applications with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 as well), and continue to deploy these application on .NET 2.0 machines. Telerik customers will be able to easily build applications with RadControls targeting both ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5.

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support
With ASP.NET 3.5 you no longer need a separate download for ASP.NET AJAX. Besides all features of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 now has richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements. VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 also have great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications. RadControls “Classic” seamlessly integrate with the new AJAX and JS improvements. RadControls “Prometheus” goes a big step further – the new generation of ASP.NET controls are natively built on top of ASP.NET AJAX and provide blazing speed and top interactivity relying on the new AJAX and JS improvements.

VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express now have a significantly improved HTML web designer (which is essentially the same thing that ships with Expression Web and SharePoint Designer). This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration. RadControls developers will now receive better design-time experience in the new design surface – you will be able to see changes in both control settings and CSS classes applied immediately with a WSIWYG preview.

LinqDataSource Support
We now have a new datasource control for ASP.NET (like the ObjectDataSource, SQLDataSource, etc controls that shipped with ASP.NET 2.0) which makes declaratively binding ASP.NET UI controls to LINQ to SQL data models really easy. (This is only for flat data-binding -- there is no hierarchical binding support with LinqDataSource yet)

Up to now, everything seems to run smoothly with the RTM build, but we still need to make sure everything is working 100% with the RTM build. Stay tuned for our Q3 2007 release in mid-December and by then please do not hesitate to let us know of any issues you have faced with VS2008 and RadControls -- we will address them ASAP!