What to Expect from Telerik's ASP.NET AJAX Control Suite in February 2013

by ASP.NET AJAX Team | Comments 9

We spent the past few weeks reviewing the feedback we’ve received from you through support tickets, our public issue tracking system, emails to our sales team, talks with our evangelists at conferences, etc. We are now officially ready to announce the plans we’ve come up with based on your input.

Basically, we will develop our ASP.NET AJAX control suite in several directions:

1. Enhancing User Experience

  • Persistence Framework – with Q1 2013 your users will be able to persist app settings between sessions.
  • Improved performance thanks to modern (light) rendering leveraging HTML5 and CSS3 in modern browsers for our Window, Dock, Rating, Tooltip, Button and FormDecorator controls.
  • Mobile support – improving the behavior of all controls under iOS6 and Windows 8 touch.
  • Accessibility - We will aim at making all RadControls Section 508 compliant and at least level AA compliant with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0/2.0.

2. Skinning
With Q1’13 we are making your skinning tasks a lot easier. Enjoy at least one new skin and SASS support allowing you to build custom skins more quickly.

Other major things we’ve planned include:

  • A new control incorporating TreeView functionality in a ComboBox
  • Two new controls extracting RadComboBox functionality in order to make it lighter – DropDownList and an advanced input with the look and feel of website search boxes.

We have a lot of enhancements to the existing controls planned as well and you can take a look at them at our Roadmap.

Don’t forget to let us know what you think about our plans! It’s important for us. By the way, we still don’t have any clue what name to choose for the “TreeViewComboBox” control, so feel free to jump in with suggestions. Thanks in advance!

About the author

Iana Tsolova

Iana Tsolova

is Program Manager of Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX division. She joined the company back in the beginning of 2008 as a Support Officer and has since occupied various positions at Telerik, including Senior Support Officer, Team Lead at one of the ASP.NET AJAX teams and Technical Support Director. Iana’s main interests are web development, reading articles related to geography, wild nature and latest renewable energy technologies.

9 Comments

Ben
Hello,
Thank you for sharing the roadmap so early in time frame. Back in summer, when MSFT introduced ASP.Net 4.5 with ModelBinding, I asked if the 2012 Q3 would support the ModelBinding in RAD Controls. I was told by Telerik support team, that there was not enough time to have that ready in Q3 and should be in 2013 Q1.
Looking at the list, I don't see any mention of "ModelBinding" which is the most important & powerful feature added in ASP.Net 4.5.
Can you please elaborate the status of that? And will all the controls (that use data binding) have support for model binding?
Thanks!
..Ben
Ben
@Dman;
Thanks for the link; I had not seen that page till now and you're right on the modelbinding support for grid. An important part of my question was, "Will ALL the controls that have datasource and data biniding, like Treeview, ListView, Combobox, Inputbox and etc., have support for ModelBinding?"

Another words can by Q1 get ride of all the datasources and shift to Modelbinding or is it going to be support for only a handful and not all.

..Ben
dman
@Ben: My gut says if they made it a point to only mention it for the Grid, it's probably just for the grid.
Ben
@Dman;
:-) That's exactly what I was thinking... Otherwise, there would have been a bold title "Support for .Net 4.5 Model Binding" without any reference to any individual controls. Let's hear it from the team and let's hope we're wrong. :-)
Ben
I would to suggest a lightweight, small footprint grid for mobile.
..Ben
Iana Tsolova
Currently we are working on implementing Model Binding for the Grid control, however our ultimate goal is to provide it for all major data bound controls: Grid, TreeList, ListView, and PivotGrid. We included Model Binding support for the RadGrid control only into our roadmap because the Model Binding feature is very complex and our controls were not designed to support it. Also it is not only to selecting data and binding the control via server-side method which returns IQueryable. It includes filtering, updating and validation, which are all major for our data bound control. That's why we will need some more time to implement and test them carefully. If we have enough time we will implement the Model Binding for all data bound controls as a bonus ;) As for the ComboBox, TreeView and the rest of the navigation group, we'll try to prepare some useful demos as even now some of the scenarios are supported with Model Binding. 
Ben
@Iana;
I greatly appreciate your transparency and giving us candid and factual answers. This way we can plan according.
Yes, the Model Binding is more than just "Reading", there is a lot more to it that each control needs to have underneath to support it. The validation that you pointed out is also very essential to use the new Validation Based on "Annotation Attributes". Just to complete the subject (and I'm not asking for Q1), is to be sure to cover "Async Page Processing" as part of the 4.5 update.
Looking forward to do some beta testing.
Thanks!
..Ben
Ben
@Iana;
One other question, since model binding is only for ASP.Net 4.5, does this mean the Q1 release is only for ASP.Net 4.5 and later?

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