Playing Around with Telerik Tools and VS2015, ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 Preview

Last week was full of big Microsoft announcements. Announcements so huge, they will redefine the developer landscape and the way enterprises think about open source software. There have been numerous articles analyzing these announcements (incl. a blog post by Sam Basu), so I'll skip directly to the main topic of this blog.

We took some time to toy with the Visual Studio 2015, ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 Preview bits, and we have some assuring news to share. Read on...

Telerik Kendo UI

As a platform-agnostic JavaScript library containing everything you need to build web and mobile sites and apps, the Telerik Kendo UI framework can readily be used with ASP.NET vNext and inside Visual Studio 2015 web projects. Being a client-side library, all you need to do is register your scripts and styles in the project, and you are ready to go:

Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC

Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC (which is essentially the server-side wrapper portion of Kendo UI) is a different story, however, because Microsoft made significant changes in the .NET Core framework (and respectively in the ASP.NET MVC6 model), modified the MVC framework namespaces as well as the source structure (which are breaking changes) and introduced TagHelpers. All of this means that the current version of Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC does not work under Microsoft's preview bits. We'll have to make significant efforts to support the new features and the new project structure.

The good news is that we have already started to work in this direction and it'll be done in parallel with future vNext updates this and next year. Our ASP.NET MVC product line will be ready for prime time when ASP.NET vNext, Visual Studio 2015 and MVC6 are shipped officially.

Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX

Microsoft promised that previous versions of web forms will be compatible with VS2015 and ASP.NET 5, and we confirm this. The latest Q3 2014 release of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX is VS 2015-ready and fully operational under the current .NET Framework 4.5.3 runtime. The controls' designers, smart tags, configuration wizards and property grids work as expected under the preview version:

Telerik Reporting

As of today, you can use Telerik Reporting in ASP.NET web applications built against the latest v4.5.3 of the .NET Framework.

When it comes to MVC6, we have already implemented a new controller for the HTML5/ASP.NET MVC report viewer, which we will release with the upcoming Q3 2014 service pack in a few weeks. A step-by-step blog post on how to add your Telerik reports to ASP.NET vNext applications is to follow, so stay tuned. There is one limitation which needs to be taken into account, though. The Telerik Reporting engine can work only on Windows machines which run the full .NET Framework, because it has calls to native code and depends on System.Drawing.

Thoughts?

If you are one of the early adopters, feel free to try our tools under the current preview bits and to share your feedback in the comments below (feel free to report any issues you encounter as well). Finally, what are your thoughts on .NET becoming open source? Do you plan to deploy/run apps on non-Windows machines? Do you think Telerik can provide you with other tools which to allow you to be more productive when you build cross-platform apps?