Prometheus Futures and... new RadFormDecorator :)

Did you know that we just released our Prometheus Futures build?
And what exactly a Futures build means?
It is nothing less than a preview build for the 2008 Q1 RadControls suite release coming in April! We keep adding new controls to the Prometheus suite to get it ready for its official premiere. Three long-awaited RadControls Classic controls were ported to the suite -  RadToolbar, RadPanelbar, RadTabstrip, thus bringing the total number of Prometheus controls to twenty-two.

The Prometheus suite is more than a suite of controls. It is built on top of MS AJAX, and offers a common client-side framework that allows for small overall client-side footprint, compared to the fully-self containted RadControls Classic. I highly recommend checking out the online demos available here:
http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/prometheus-futures 

Here is a forum post that features plenty of information about what's packed in the build:
http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/thread/b311D-bcmkaa.aspx

I would also like to take the chance to share some information about a brand new control developed by my team, that we just added to the suite - the all-new RadFormDecorator :) The FormDecorator started more like a fun project that we posted in our CodeLibrary section. However, judging by the amount of comments it generated, it turns out people have been waiting for such a thing for quite some time.
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bcaecg.aspx

What is the RadFormDecorator control? It will skin your page buttons, checkboxes, radiobuttons, checkbox lists, radiobutton lists without the need for you to write any code or change anything on the page! Just drop the RadFormDecorator - set a property or two in case you need fine-tuning, and off you go! It cannot get more "unobtrusive" than that :) So many people wanted it a part of the Prometheus suite, that we decided to include it there, with all the bells and whistles - revised client code, support for all the Prometheus skins, as well as implementing new features that keep coming. Here are the RadFormDecorator current online demos, in case you want to give them a quick look -
http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/prometheus-futures/FormDecorator/Examples/Default/DefaultCS.aspx

Here are the main features of the RadFormDecorator (compared to the CodeProject version): 

• 12 skins 
• Hover/Out states for the buttons using pure CSS 
• Caching of images for IE6 for smooth user experience 
• CSS for disabled radiobuttons, checkboxes and buttons 
• Various CSS look & feel improvements

Internally, we also have 2 new examples, and the following new features complete:

• DecorationZoneID - allows decorating parts of the page, not the whole page. Among other things, this allows using multiple RadFormDecorator to skin different sections of the page.
• Automatically detects partial page updates and re-decorates updated page portions
• Ability to allso skin the scrollbars (IE only) - for all 12 skins.

And, of course, there are more improvements that we have in mind for the control :)