How time flies! Seems like just yesterday we were rolling out with a fresh new release of the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, but here we are ready to go with the next iteration. As always with a new release we want to do a quick highlight of what is new in the product suite, so get excited everyone – here’s the latest news on the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC.

Platform Support

We’ve added quite a lot of new things in the way of support to this release. First of all we have the highly anticipated support of the latest IDE brought to us by Microsoft – Visual Studio 2012 RC (or as many of you might be used to, VS11). While the components have worked fine within the beta so far, we now have support for the latest RC.

Additionally, when speaking of RCs, we have gone ahead and ensured that our MVC Extensions work within the latest version of the ASP.NET platform as well, offering the ability to utilize them within the release candidate of ASP.NET 4. Check it out by creating a new project, you’ll see an option for a Telerik ASP.NET 4 MVC project!

It might be hard to keep up with all of the browser updates that are occurring, but we’re also offering support for Firefox 13, which will be happy news for all of your Firefox fans out there!

New Features

There are of course also a whole slew of new features that are being released with the new version of the components as well. Here are some highlights from the various components.

Chart

Reverse Axis

The chart now allows you to do a simple reversal of an axis. This is true both for the X and Y axis, but for the sake of not blowing your mind completely we can take a quick look of an example of just reversing the Y Axis. Reversing the axis allows you to take this chart

And turn it in to this

Now we have a reversed Y-axis where the X-axis labels are at the top, and Mar 2011 is at the top of the chart as opposed to the bottom. This is all handled by using the .Reverse() property on your axis of choice. So in my example above I just did the following:

Pretty easy, no?

Date and Time Pickers

Specifying Dates

Date and Time Pickers or the hybrid DateTimePicker now offer the ability to specify the set of dates which will be displayed within the component, allowing you to move outside of the Min/Max range limitation and pick specific key dates to display.

Editor

View and Edit HTML

The Editor now allows you to provide a built-in tool which will display the HTML of the editor’s content to the user in a modal popup. This can be enabled simply by adding ViewHTML() to your list of tools. If we have the following text in our Editor, with just the ViewHTML() tool enabled

We can then click the icon which the arrow is pointing to and get the HTML for our Editor’s content!

Very neat! Also, notice how there is a cursor at the beginning of that nice and clean HTML and that there’s an Update bottom in the bottom right-had corner? That’s right folks, you can freely enter HTML in to this area and update the content of the Editor accordingly!

Grid

Ordering AutoGenerated Columns

Previously AutoGenerated columns have only taken in to account the order of the fields on the entities you have passed to by a top to bottom approach (or first to last depending on how you see it). Well, this isn’t necessarily an ideal situation where you want to ensure that all columns either have a certain order, or that one or two columns always come before the others. With the Q2 2012 the Telerik ASP.NET MVC Grid offers the ability to provide a pre-defined order for these columns, even when using auto generated columns.

This is all handled by the DisplayAttribute which can decorate all of your entities fields. It’s as simple as setting the following:

Which, in this case, would place a column as the second column in your Grid as the column index starts at 0. As I mentioned before you can set this across all columns or even just a select few.

Added Filtering Options

We’ve also gone ahead and added a few new filtering options as can be seen by this screenshot

Notice how there is a dropdown where traditionally the filter would just say “And”. This can now be changed to “Or”. Additionally we also have the “Does not contain” filter option available!

New Rows Added to Bottom

The Grid now also allows you to add a new row to the bottom or the Grid as opposed to adding it at the top, something I know quite a few of you have asked for!

KendoUI for ASP.NET MVC

I also wanted to make a note the newly released beta version of Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC! This product brings all of the exciting features from or KendoUI product over to ASP.NET MVC. If you want to find out more information regarding the release you can check out this blog post over at KendoUI.com. You might also be curious as to how KendoUI for ASP.NET MVC and the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC fit together. This has already been addressed in an earlier blog post that I did last week, which you can find right here.

Ready, Set, Download!

So there you have it folks, a quick overview of what is new with the Telerik MVC Extensions for ASP.NET MVC! If you haven’t already I say go ahead and download the latest bits and play around with them, you won’t be disappointed. While you’re at it give the beta of Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC a spin as well and let us know what you think!