Colossal Q1 2015 Release for Telerik UI for WinForms

New Year, new release. I am happy to announce the Q1 2015 release of Telerik UI for WinForms. We continue to invest heavily in developing and maintaining our Windows Forms offering. In this release we addressed more than 160 feedback items from you, our users. Be sure to get in touch or post in our feedback portal regarding anything that you want to see change.

Here are the highlights of this release:

• New control: RadLinearGauge
• New control: RadBulletGraph
• New control: RadDiagram (beta)
• New control: RadCheckedListBox
• New visual studio templates: Word and Outlook inspired templates
• New features in RadChartView: Marked zones, new series (waterfall, funnel, range, scatter area, hlc), annotations, inverse axis and so on
• General improvements in RadDock and RadChartView
• RadPdfProcessing is now official

As you can see, there is a lot packed in this release. I will try to be as short as possible and summarize the major benefits of the release.

RadLinearGauge

Linear gauge is a linear scale, that can display multiple scales and ranges. Highlights include:

• Fully customizable elements: bars, lines, needle, ticks and labels
• Precise design time selection of the gauge elements
• Animation effects when the value is changed
• Plenty of gauge styles
• Save/Load layout to XML.

RadBulletGraph

RadBulletGraph is a variation of linear gauge. It combines a number of indicators, as well as the data indicator, into one control that's lightweight, easily customizable and straightforward to set up and use. The control is a great tool for dashboards--it's the optimal way to present a lot of information in relatively small area. Key features are.

• Easy to use: Just drag and drop from the toolbox
• Supports the full design specification: Non zero-based scale, negative featured measures, projected values, having many comparative measures and quantitative ranges is not a problem
• Data Binding Support: The control can be easily data-bound to your business data, either by setting its properties directly, or by using a binding declaration

RadDiagram (beta)

The main purpose of the diagramming solution is to provide a framework (control and API) to facilitate the creation of diagramming and rich data visualizations. The framework tools and features can help you create a variety of diagramming solutions easily, such as org charts, flow and process diagrams, and so on.

The control will be released in beta with the following features supported:

• Design time support: A property builder allowing you to predefine the diagram content.
• Diagram ribbn control: An easy-to-associate ribbon control with the most common diagram functions
• Diagram toolbox control: A predefined set of shapes available for drag and drop to a diagram control
• Predefined shapes (more to come)
• Mouse tools (pan to come)
• Diagram Commands
• Layouts: Sugiyama and tree layouts
• Drag and drop of elements in the control
• Line connector
• Custom connectors
• Item rotation, resizing, ZOrder, selection
• Align and snap to grid, and Align and snap to item
• Grouping
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• ReadOnly diagram
• Undo-redo support (will be further extended)
• Clipboard operations: Cut, copy, paste
• Serialization (will be further extended)
• Global settings: Applied to all items in the diagram (for example, disable resize)
• Services: Undo/redo service, serialization service and so on
• Export to xml

RadCheckedListBox

RadCheckedListBox is an enhanced alternative to the standard Windows Forms checked list box control. RadCheckedListBox uses RadListView as a foundation. All previous functionality is preserved, such as visual formatting and data binding, which are now extended.

New Visual Studio Templates

We are also adding two predefined Visual Studio templates to get you started, or to just make it easier for you to see a ready-to-go application. The templates included are Word and Outlook inspired applications created with Telerik UI for WinForms.

In the New Project window of Visual Studio, when you select Telerik Windows Forms Application, you will be presented with our wizard. Using the wizard, you can create a Standard project (which is a standard project with RadForm), as well as Word-inspired or Outlook-inspired projects.

Here is how the Outlook-inspired template looks like in Visual Studio. You can just hit F5 and run it.

And the Word-inspired template.

New Features in RadChartView

Many new features were introduced in RadChartView, as well. Here are some of them:

• Annotations
  • Plot bands and marked zones
    
    
    
  • Grid lines
    
  • Radial line
    
• New series
  • ScatterArea series
    
  • HLC (high-low-close) series
    
  • Waterfall series
    
  • Range series
    
  • RangeBar series
    
  • Funnel series
    
• Inverse axes
  
• Export to image
• Mouse aware zooming a.k.a. fixed point zooming

General Improvements in RadDock and RadChartView

In this release, we undertake major improvements in our docking and charting controls, by addressing most of our feedback items. If you notice anything else, make sure you get back to us.

I'd better stop and let you dive into the new release. You can get it from your Telerik account or by downloading a trial.