RadControls for WinForms Q2 2012 Now Available

It’s yet another super exciting moment here at Telerik. We are once again ready to present you the next version of Windows Forms, now available for immediate download with the powerful Q2 2012 release of RadControls for WinForms. The second major edition of our toolbox for 2012 is packed with three brand-new controls, a slew of essential enhancements to the theming mechanism performance and memory usage, as well as various accessibility improvements.

Top new features across the Telerik’s WinForms suite include:

RadChartView - New lively chart control

The brand new ChartView control coming out-of-the-box facilitates data visualization, achieving stunning visual effects. On the back-end it’s coming with an engine, completely re-built from scratch. This new chart component sets no limits on your data visualization needs. It can easily turn into Bar, Pie, Line, Area, Polar, Radar and Scatter with only a few clicks at design time. The input data is contained in a set of series classes. Each series have a collection of data points, that is, a data source which it displays according to the series’ type. Through the use of different series types you are now able to process certain types of data points – for example categorical series may contain categorical data points. You are also enabled to add data points directly to series or use a data binding mechanism to create appropriate data points from the row data. Read more.

RadAutoCompleteBox - New Outlook-like text box

This new control presents a text box which allows users to type text or to select entries from a predefined list using auto completion as they type to find each item. It is very similar to the text editor that is available in Outlook when composing an email and entering the address. Thus, you are now able to easily deliver text processing experience, which your users are intimately acquainted with. An auto complete mode with a drop down list and predefined item elements allowing for insertion of a text, image and a button are just some within the bunch of all cool new features incorporated. Check our dedicated blog.

New RadTextBox control

Q2 2012 enlivens your textboxes introducing RadTextBox. This new text box control is independent from its native implementation as it supports transparency and allows you to set custom backgrounds such as images and gradients. RadTextBox brings all standard text editing features as well as the option to display default text when no actual data has been entered. The example below shows what you can easily achieve in just a few seconds:

Re-charged theming mechanism and lower memory utilization

We’ve managed to deliver a huge improvement across the whole suite by paying a great deal of effort on boosting our theming mechanism performance and optimizing memory usage. The three times reduction in size of our main DLL speaks for itself for the scope of changes applied.

Accessibility improvements

You will find a bunch of accessibility improvements delivered with the latest version of RadControls for WinForms which enable your applications to easily reach visually impaired people. These include significant keyboard navigation and narration support enhancements for some of the major controls in the suite.

Hot new demo on the shelf

 And last but not least, we are happy to bring at your fingertips Bookshelf. This is a new demo aiming to demonstrate the stunning Metro look that you could easily achieve by using RadControls for WinForms. The data is pulled from the Ebay book store and is arranged in the familiar panorama view. It is a reference application, which can be used by bookstores to help customers find the books they are interested in. Searching and grouping is also available.

Eager to enliven your apps with all the new goodies? Download the fresh Q2 2012 release and start experimenting with it.