Telerik AJAX Q3 2011 Beta - New Org Chart and Social Share controls, Metro skin and more

by ASP.NET AJAX Team | Comments 16

The final major release of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX for this year brings new controls, embedded Metro skin and a plethora of new features for the existing controls to the table. The Q3 2011 Beta preview which has just been uploaded on the site (both for TRIAL and COMMERCIAL users) grants a direct access to the pre-release bits to play with them at your disposal. Read on to learn more about the Beta:

Org Chart | Social Share | Metro Skin | Items drag and drop on mobile

The Premium Telerik AJAX component set grows with a couple more controls - Org Chart and Social Share.

  • Org Chart - organization chart control with flexible rendering capabilities (rendered fields, templates, grouping in nodes, etc.), xml export/import functionality and data-binding to a variety of data sources.

    OrgChart_1

    OrgChart_2
    See Demos
  • Social Share - intuitively configurable widget for effortless content sharing via different social networks. Easy to be configured and customized, with multi-tracker Google Analytics support and optional 'Send email' form.

    SocialShare_1
    SocialShare_2
    See Demos

In addition, we are shipping a new Metro skin modeled on par with the Metro design guidelines and part of the new Telerik.Web.UI.Skins assembly, introduced in Q2 2011. Furthermore, an official coverage for the latest versions of the FireFox and Chrome browsers as well as FIPS support is delivered. On top of that, now you can drag and drop grid, listview, treelist and treeview items on mobile touch-enabled devices, with the scheduler following them for the official Q3'11 release.

Finally, we introduce a very handy design-time feature for our AJAX controls in VS 2008/2010, i.e. the ability to auto-attach client event handlers by selecting a new or existing handler method for this purpose:

Controls_AutoAttachClientEvents

New features for existing components

Grid group header/footer templates and performance optimizations - our leading AJAX web grid gets one more functionality to its feature arsenal: group header/footer templates. Moreover, the grid grouping performance has been vastly improved in a variety of scenarios. In some of them the performance boost leads to 10x to 100x faster loading times, or even more! Stay tuned for a separate blog post on this subject in the upcoming weeks.

Grid_GroupHeaderFooterTemplates

See Demo

Editor Insert video url dialog and RibbonBar toolbar modes - the editor control receives handy insert video url dialog that allows you to configure how the video will be visualized and played in the editor content area (in terms of aspect ratio, dimensions, etc.). RibbonBar toolbar modes are introduced with this release as well.

Editor_InsertVideoDialog

See Demo

Image Editor features - the AJAX image editor introduced in the previous Q2 2011 release accommodates several new features, such as insert image in image, toolbar modes, zoom edited image with mouse wheel, keyboard support, enhanced accessibility, etc.

ImageEditor_Features_Q3_2011

See Demos

Drag and drop upload - our AsyncUpload now allows multiple file upload with drag and drop on browsers which already support this feature (like the newest versions of FireFox and Chrome).

AsyncUpload_DragDropUpload

See Demo

RibbonBar features - the AJAX RibbonBar now incorporates contextual tabs, quick access toolbar and very neat keyboard support.

RibbonBar_Features_Q3_2011

See Demos

Keyboard support and PDF export for TreeList - two major features for the TreeList control that augment its accessibility and provide the option to export its structure in PDF format.

TreeList_PDFExport

See Demos 

Button template - a brand new RadButton functionality that allows you to define it in a complete custom manner by means of a template container.

Button_ContentTemplate

See Demo

SharePoint 2010 Web Parts updates

The SharePoint 2010 AJAX web parts we have are not left overlooked in this release, too. SPRadGrid supports more content types and exposes public UI for save/restore grid settings on a per user basis. Additionally, the SPRadGrid and SPRadListView web parts binding is optimized to gain better performance and two new SPRadEditor live demos (for lists and web parts editing scenario) are added on our SharePoint 2010 demo site.


The Q3'11 live demos, documentation and release notes are available at:
Live Demos | Documentation | Release Notes

And if all this is not enough for you, we are saving a few more thrilling features for the official Q3 2011, down for mid November :) Until then we will be glad to hear your comments on the Q3 2011 Beta bits either by commenting this blog post or posting your feedback in the AJAX Q3 2011 Beta forum. We are all ears!

Are you into ASP.NET development? Download our AJAX and MVC components now to cut back development time and boost your productivity!

About the author

Stefan Rahnev

Stefan Rahnev

is the Unit Manager of the ASP.NET Telerik Division. He has been working for the company since 2005, when he started out as a regular support officer. His next steps at Telerik took him through the positions of Technical Support Director and co-team leader in one of the ASP.NET AJAX teams. Stefan’s main interests are web development, agile processes planning and management, client services and psychology.

Posted in: release aspnet-ajax

16 Comments

Josh
Glaring error - Berbatov only rides the bench.
Michael G. Schneider
These are interesting improvements. I am looking forward to using that release.
I saw two small problems with the Metro skin, when being used in Chrome browser.
(1) The sample "Button / Add elements in RadButton" given in http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax-beta/button/examples/contenttemplate/defaultcs.aspx shows a wide black border on the right side.
(2) The sample "Combobox / Configurator" given in http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax-beta/combobox/examples/configurator/defaultcs.aspx shows some unwanted color. Click on the down arrow. Then the text in the main part of the control will be selected with another blue background.
Ivan
Hi, Michael.
To address your questions directly:
1) If you open the demo directly, you will not see that black border. However, if you go to another demo and change the skin to say Metro, then refresh the first demo and you'll get it. What happens is that the styles for the demo are fit for the Default skin. In short, the example demonstrates how to add content in RadButton control which in most cases should not be related with the skin applied.
Long story short, we've fixed the example and we'll apply the fix with the next update to the demos.
2) We'll check on that. It does seem like inconsistent behaviour.
Michael G. Schneider
Hello Ivan,
thanks a lot for the answer.
I knew that (1) was caused by the Metro skin. Actually, I usually open the samples, then on the first page that I look at, I switch to a certain skin. From then on, I do not care whether there is a skin control in the upper right corner. I expected all samples to be shown with the previously choosen skin.
After having understood that my assumption was wrong, the question is: why don't all sample pages have a skin selector? These pages are best for learning about a skin. It would be ideal if any control coul be tested that way.
Ivan
Michael,
that's a very, very, very interesting question -- why don't all sample pages have a skin selector.
I am afraid it has a rather dull answer -- not all demos are fit for all skins. The transparent skin per say is the hardest to integrate in a demo, since it's semi-transparent and it requires a certain background graphic; or the Metro skin, which by design is all squared and simple looking and has almost no or no eye candy at all.
Ultimately, the demos are more about what can be done in terms of technology with Telerik's RadControls and less about appearance. Never the less appearance is also very important, so we provide different skill demos where possible.
I hope that addresses your question.
On a side note, perhaps you are right that skinning resource are a bit scarce. I guess we could improve on that.
DrHouseZG
Nice new components, but with small list of features, do you want feature suggestions during beta testing ? :-)
Stefan Rahnev
We do accept feature suggestions in the Q3'11 AJAX Beta forum, although they will not make it for the official launch but rather in a future version. 
Bill
Question about the Metro skin.  Will it be simple to change the colors used?  Or is it fixed w/ the default colors?
Ben
I also have the same question as Bill has regarding the change of colors with Metro skin.
Secondly, will be possible to support viewing PDF in the image editor? I would like to use one control to show images and PDFs.
Thanks!
..Ben
Vasil Yordanov
To Bill and Ben,
With Q3 2011 we will ship the Metro Blue skin as embedded in our skins dll. It features the Blue color as accent one on a white background. The option to have a different color is to create a custom skin /e.g. with Visual Style Builder/ replacing the accent/background color with the one you like.
Feeling that there would be requests like yours, we are currently working hard to deliver five more Metro variations with different accent colors for the official release. Namely: Cyan, Magenta, Lime, Green & Red. These skins will not be embedded, but available for download in our Skin Sharing Portal.
Regarding the PDF - Currently, we are not considering PDF support in RadImageEditor as our intention is to cover basic image-editing functionality. But, hey, that's a good idea and we will have it in mind for future versions.
Ben
Thanks Vasil;
Jon E
On the treelist will you be adding export to excel as well?
Also on the charts is there an intention to improve these, I think you have more asp.net users than win mobile 7/ silverlight users yet those charts seem to look good while the asp.net charts are abysmal - I have to use one of your competitor's charts instead.  Please please please start to improve them!
Stefan Rahnev
Yes, we do plan to introduce Excel export for the treelist for the next major release of the suite. 
Updates/improvements are not planned for the present AJAX chart in the future, however you may consider utilizing our Kendo UI SVG chart which is HTML5-powered and will be actively developed: http://demos.kendoui.com/chart/index.html
Stefan Rahnev
Thank you for the nice words about the new SocialShare control which has been added to our AJAX package. I hope that you will find it pretty useful.
Concerning the forum post you brought up:
My colleagues from the Telerik Support Staff will respond to it in a timely manner.
Jack
With the new release, will the RibbonBar allow for text to be put on two lines or word wrapping, etc.
I brought this up several months ago and was hoping in would be in the next release.
Most of my items in the RibbonBar are two words and it is causing major problems with how many items I can get on the control.  Plus it just looks bad.
If not, is there a way for me to change that function in the code?

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