Beta version of Rad Controls for Silverlight 2 available

by Valentin Stoychev | Comments 5

With the Telerik Q2 release the Silverlight team releases the Beta version of the Rad Controls for Silverlight2.

The controls are separated in 4 different assemblies:
 
Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation
  - Window, Menu, TreeView, TabControl, PanelBar, Cube

Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input
  - ComboBox, Upload, Calendar, DatePicker, NumericUpDown

Telerik.Windows.Controls.MediaPlayer 
 - MediaPlayer.

Telerik.Windows.Controls
  - Range Slider, ProgressBar, WrapPanel, DockPanel, UniformGridPanel
  

What is the current status of the suite and where we are heading to?

All of the controls are fully featured and extensively tested. We released two CTP versions of the controls before the current "Beta 1". We have got a lot of feedback from the community (a big THANKS! for that - keep it coming!)

  • We will now continue to work on polishing the existing controls:

    • adding more embedded skins and themes. A good example of what we are trying to achieve with the number of themes is our RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.
    • adding better support for Microsoft Blend. You can edit each control theme in Blend2.5 even now, but there is still a lot to be done in this area. We are working closely with Microsoft on this and I'm sure you will see some amazing design time support in the future.
    • adding more examples and KB articles
    • help - we have only an API reference for the moment. A complete help for all the controls will be available with the next major release
  • Web services support
    We believe this is very important topic especially when developing with Silverlight. We will provide examples and sample applications for using WebServices with our controls and performing CRUD  operations with them and the data source. We are also looking for feedback if creating some wrapper controls for easing the work with web services will be a good idea?
  • New controls that we are working on and hopefully will have their debut with Telerik Q3 release:
     - Grid for Silverlight
     - Carousel for Silverlight


    The above controls have their WPF versions even now. You can check the demos here: http://www.telerik.com/demos/wpf
     
    We are also working on a docking layout control for Silverlight. To get an idea of what this control will feature, you can check our RadDock for Winforms. We believe this is a must control for Silverlight - here is a sample screenshot:

 Docking Layout for Winforms

I hope this gives you a better idea about where we are now and what to expect from us in the next couple of months.

Go download the controls now and give us your feedback!

,
Team Leader,
Windows Phone Team

 

5 Comments

Ben
I really enjoy your company's policy for being straight forward and clear about things. Thank you Valentin for the road map. You will soon see many developers starting to use SL to develop LOB apps which will require accessing Web services and data sources. Anything that can minimize the repetitive work, will bring your suite closer to a "Complete" solution. For example, Imagine I have to develop a business application which requires 30 maintenance forms for CRUD. It will take a long time repeating the same procedures of building the form, placing input controls, labels, buttons and etc. to create one CRUD form. Now, imagine if you had a panel (data Panel) that we could hook it up to a data source and at design time, we could pick the fields and then it would automatically create the layout of input fields and labels and depending on what options we selected(add/Delete/Update/Browse), the associated buttons would show up. This type of composite control will bring the RAD to SL. Again, thank you for beta1!
Donna
Perhaps you can clear me up on something... it seems the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX only recently came out (first of the year). Now I see the Silverlight controls. Are the Silverlight controls to eventually replace the AJAX ones? If so, ballpark timeframe? Otherwise, if not replacing, I'm confused on which I should be using and the purpose of each. Any clarifications you can make for me would be helpful. thank you!
Ben
Valentin; You mentioned the Docking layout. Check out this site. http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/layout-browser/layout-browser.html
Alex
Donna, I don't see Silverlight replacing AJAX. It will just be another option. Not every application will be built using Silverlight. Regards
Mahmoud
can i use beta version of the telerik controls in a community based applications. applications in intranet environment

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