Telerik blogs

Q2 2014 of UI for WinForms is already out and it is full of new features and improvements following your requests and suggestions. Let’s dive straight in and see what is new in this release.

Document Processing Libraries

UI for WinForms now provides the APIs for working with the most common document formats: DOCX, RTF, XLSX, CSV, and PDF. With this release, you can embed, load, create, convert and print documents directly within your apps, without needing to have Microsoft Office, or any other external library, installed.

Document Processing Libraries by Telerik

 

Built-In Text Search in RadGridView

RadGridView is now enhanced with smart text search functionality. Upon writing in the built-in search text field, the end user will get immediate visual feedback from RadGridView if the visible cells on the screen match the search criteria. Furthermore, upon clicking the search button or hitting the Enter key, the end user will be navigated to the cells of interest. The search process is asynchronous ensuring smooth application experience.

Search in RadGridView by Telerik

Improved RadScheduler

Without doubt, Scheduler a powerful and highly-used component. Based on your feedback, we are glad to introduce an improved version of RadScheduler that addresses shortcomings and enhances its functionality and performance. Here are a few of the enhancements at a glance

The Ability to Change the Start/End of the Work Week

Usually, we have a Mon-Fri work week. However, there are countries and particular companies that do not follow this practice and have a different meaning for a “business week”. Thanks to the WorkWeekStart and WorkWeekEnd properties, they can now set a custom start and end day for their work weeks. Here is how RadScheduler looks when the business week is Mon-Thu 10:00 am – 04:00 pm (it would be nice to have such a work week, huh :) )

Custom Work Week for RadScheduler by Telerik

Work Hours Exceptions

Well, each work day would probably need an hour for a lunch break and you might want this to be reflected in your scheduler. For example, let’s have a lunch break between 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm. In this case, RadScheduler will look like this:

Work Time Exceptions for RadScheduler by Telerik

Custom Elements Support

The extended RadScheduler API allows for embedding your own custom elements, thus providing you with a way to achieve a great variety of design and behavioral customizations. Just check the screenshot below. There you can find a custom ruler which gets green between 9:00 am and 9:00 pm, a custom appointment element, and a custom cell which, on mouse hover, prompts you to add an appointment.

Custom Elements for RadScheduler by Telerik

Scrollbar in the AllDay Appointments Area.

In case you have lots of all day appointments, the all-day area height normally increases. Until now, the height of the area was equal to the height of the all-day appointments altogether, which could result in the main appointment area being hidden by the all-day area. Now the all-day area supports a scrolling behavior, so that the all-day area height will increase up to a certain point and then the rest of the all-day appointments will be available to you by a scroll action.

Scrollable AllDay Area for RadScheduler by Telerik

Show Whole Months in MonthView Plus Easy Navigation

The MonthView can now display whole months regardless of the WeekCount property. In addition, you can easily navigate between the months using the mouse wheel or the scrollbar on the right.

Months in MonthView for RadScheduler by Telerik

Resizable Resource Groups

Until now all resource groups were given equal width in RadScheduler. However, in various cases the end-user may want to give more attention to the appointments of a specific resource. Therefore, as of this release, you can control the width of the groups and make a selected group bigger than the others.

Resizable Resource Groups for RadScheduler by Telerik

Resizable Columns in Timeline View

There could be many appointments in a single column (day) of the timeline view. In order for the end-user to be able to more clearly see the information about the appointments, RadScheduler allows for resizing the columns:

Resizable Columns for RadScheduler by Telerik

Precise Appointment Position

The appointments layout now takes into consideration the minutes part of the start/end appointments’ time. Check the screenshot below where we have three appointments that take place at 8:15 – 11:45, 8:25 – 10:50 and 9:45 – 11:07 and see how they are arranged in the view to reflect that.

Precise Appointment Position for RadScheduler by Telerik

Null-Value Support for RadChartView

A feature useful in many business cases, null-value support, is now available in ChartView. It enables RadChartView to properly display data with missing records for a given category or date, so your end users don’t confuse the missing records with zero values for those categories/dates.

NullValue Support for RadChart by Telerik

Multi-Line Support for Tabs in RadPageView

A highly requested feature, the ability to arrange tabs in multiple lines is now available with Q2 2014. This feature enables you to see more of your tabs in one glance, even when the width of your RadPageView instance is smaller.

MultiLine Support for RadPageView by Telerik

Interactive Splitters and Split Buttons in RadSplitContainer

As of this release, RadSplitContainer provides interactive splitters and split buttons. This feature allows the end-user to more intuitively collapse or expand a panel when needed. Thanks to this out-of-the-box feature, you no longer need to use code to control the expand/collapse behavior of your end-users.

Splitter Buttons for RadSplitContainer by Telerik

Navigation Improvements in RadCalendar

RadCalendar now offers slick animated navigation between views similar to the one in the Windows calendar. Thanks to that feature, you can easily switch to a date years ahead or behind of the date currently in view.

Animated Navigation for RadCalendar by Telerik

The popup navigation of RadCalendar has been enhanced as well. Thanks to the extended API in the form of the new MonthStep property, you can now tell what is the step by which the items stand from the current moment. For example, the calendar on the left shows the default view of the popup navigation where MonthStep is set to 1, while the calendar on the right has its MonthStep set to 6:


Popup Navigation for RadCalendar by Telerik

Freely Typed Dates in RadMaskedEditBox/RadDateTimePicker

Up until now, end-users had to enter dates according to a specific predefined mask. With this release, they are able to enter a date in a wide range of formats, and RadMaskedEditBox will automatically convert the entered date into a DateTime value.

Free Input for RadMaskedEditBox by Telerik

Date and Time Picking Made Easy With RadDateTimePicker

Up until now, the drop down menu in RadDateTimePicker only allowed selecting a date. This Q release allows you to pick not only the date, but the time as well. Furthermore, it supports freely typed dates, automatically selecting the entered date.


Date and TIme picking with RadDateTimePicker by Telerik

Visual Style Builder AutoRecover Feature

Now Visual Style Builder automatically saves your work every two minutes by default. You can easily tweak this setting from the Settings window.

AutoRecover for Visual Style Builder by Telerik

Text Baseline Alignment at Design-Time

It is now a breeze to align text-based controls with the new text baseline indicator at design-time.

Baseline Support by Telerik

RadTimePicker: Available Time Range

Now RadTimePicker allows time selection only in a given predefined time range. MinTime and MaxTime properties would determine what this range is.

WordWrap for RadTextBoxControl

RadTextBoxControl now offers not just TextWrap, but WordWrap as well. Check the picture below – on the left we have a RadTextBoxControl with TextWrap, while on the right we have RadTextBoxControl with WordWrap.

WordWrap for RadTextBoxControl by Telerik

I can continue describing all the improvements, but that sure will be a long list! So why don’t you just try UI for WinForms for yourself and dive right into the Demo application that ships with it? To see the whole list of issues we addressed, you can check out our Full Release Notes.

Last, but not least, I would like to invite you to watch the DevCraft Q2’14 Release Online Conference to see what is new in UI for WinForms and learn how DevCraft can help you add responsive capabilities to your applications. Join us on June 24, 11am ET for Be Responsive: .NET UI for Any Device. Release your seat now.

Happy coding!

DevCraft Q2 2014 Online Conference by Telerik


About the Author

Nikolay Diyanov

Diyanov is the Product Manager of the Native Mobile UI division at Progress. Delivering outstanding solutions that make developers' lives easier is his passion and the biggest reward in his work. In his spare time, Nikolay enjoys travelling around the world, hiking, sun-bathing and kite-surfing.

Find him on Twitter @n_diyanov or on LinkedIn.

Related Posts

Comments

Comments are disabled in preview mode.