Q1 2010 Telerik RadControls for WinForms Roadmap

The Q1 2010 release is approaching fast, and we are working overtime to deliver major new features into RadControls for WinForms. A brand new Visual Style Builder is on its way, as well as an updated and optimized GridView data layer, several new grid LOB features, and a new Timeline view for RadScheduler.

The RadControls for WinForms Q1 2010 Roadmap is already live on telerik.com and you can view it here:

RadControls for WinForms Roadmap

Here is a brief overview of the most important improvements:

Visual Style Builder (VSB) for WinForms

The new version will dramatically reduce the time needed for creating themes for RadControls for WinForms. How dramatic? Well, how about creating a new theme in minutes?

As you know, RadControls for WinForms use styles (as opposed to images) for each state of the control (MouseOver, MouseDwon, Selected, Disabled, etc.). Because of this, it makes perfect sense to use different styles to create a theme, and apply and reuse these styles to controls’ states.

Here is where the new Style Repository of the VSB comes to life. The 2010 VSB Style Repository lists all styles used across controls, and once you create or tweak a style, it can be applied with simple drag and drop to any control’s state. The real time saving feature however is that if you modify this style later on, it will be automatically applied to all controls and states that use it! And because we always strive for simplicity and ease of use, all styles can be created, updated and applied codelessly, without the need to know the essentials of Telerik RadControls for WinForms.

RadGridView

Q1 2010 will be a major milestone for RadGridView for WinForms as well. The plan is to update both the UI and data layers in order to support the most demanding data-intensive scenarios, improve performance, and add new features.

The current GridView’s data layer is based on Microsoft’s DataView, which is not very customizable, and does not support demanding data-manipulation scenarios. As a result, for Q1 2010 we plan to extract and separate the GridView data components into two new ones: RadListSource (a provider for bound/unbound data), and RadDataView (for filtering, grouping and sorting operations). This will allow us to address all of the current data layer shortcomings, and to provide an optimized, better performing GridView control which uses less memory.

The features we are working on are geared towards large LOB applications and include Column Virtualization; Transposed Grid; Grouping by Multiple Columns; Custom Views; Pinned Rows/Columns; Split View; and Generalized Scrolling via a VirtualizedScrollPanel that you can use to easily add virtualized scrolling to any RadControl element and/or layout by only defining the logical and visual items.

RadScheduler

Q1 2010 will bring a much requested view to RadScheduler for WinForms: Timeline. This view displays appointments in horizontally arranged time slots. It will be easy to work with and customize, and will support all features that are already  available in the other views, such as resource grouping, create/add/modify appointments at run-time, user selection, appointment resizing and drag and drop, keyboard navigation, and even a customizable timeline context menu.

Full VS2010 support, incl. support for the .NET4 Client Profile

We also plan to provide full Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 (incl. .NETFX 4.0 Client Profile) support once they become official. We currently support the VS 2010 Beta2 version. 

Q1 2010 Beta

A public Q1 2010 Beta release is expected in mid February - do not hesitate to grab it and share your feedback.

 

Other products' roadmaps are also available:
RadControls for Silverlight
RadControls for WPF
RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
RadControls for ASP.NET MVC
OpenAccess ORM
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