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Enhance the appearance of your apps with ​the new Material Design theme​ and the improved Theme Builder. Build Excel-like solutions with ease thanks to the official Spread​sheet. Raise the accessibility of your apps to a new level with the introduced Section 508 improvements.

Allow me to present the highlights of the upcoming Q​1 201​6 release:

Spreadsheet

The official release of the Excel-like component will offer the following ​important features:

  • Add/Remove Columns and Rows
  • Cell Formatting features like the following: Cut, Copy and Paste, Apply Border, Alignment, Text Wrapping, Increase and Decrease Decimal, Custom Formats
  • Sorting and Filtering
  • Data Validation
  • Import/Export—CSV, JSON, Tab delimited text
  • Conditional Formatting
  • Scrolling and Pinned Headers/Columns
  • Context Menu
  • And more

ASP.NET AJAX RadSpreadsheet
Figure 1: RadSpreadSheet—the screenshot represents the features available only in the Beta.

Material Design Skin

The ASP.NET AJAX controls will get a new modern dress inspired by the popular Material Design of Google. The Material theme will feature depth effects such as lighting and shadows which will make your apps more vivid and interactive. You will be able to change the default theme colors through the Theme Builder app.
 
Material Design Theme

Figure 2: Light Green version of the Material Design Theme.

ThemeBuilder Improvements

The theme creator tool will ​continue to be improved with the addition of the remaining Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls and some of the most popular themes like Silk, Glow, Metro and MetroTouch. Our long-term plans include adding new themes, like one similar to the default Kendo UI theme, that will be available for download from the app.

We will also research the possibility of providing wider support for conversion of Twitter Bootstrap themes, so that the developers can use the AJAX controls along with the Bootstrap widgets on the same page with the same look and feel.
 

Theme Builder Overview
  Figure ​3: Theme Builder app.

Accessibility Improvements

With the introduction of WAI-ARIA compatibility for RadAutoCompleteBox, RadButton, RadWindow, RadAlert, RadConfirm and RadPrompt, you will be able to build more accessible and usable web projects, especially for people who rely on screen readers and who cannot use a mouse.

Easy-to-Use Separate Button Components

We identified ​the need of our customers ​to provide separate definitions for the ​child RadButton controls. This will introduce the following benefits:
  • Easier configuration​—there will be a server tag for each button type (PushButton, ImageButton, LinkButton, etc..) and fewer properties to achieve the same level of functionality as with RadButton
  • Performance optimization
  • Infrastructure for new button types for Q2 2016: button list, switch button, split button and more
  • We won't remove the parent RadButton and your updated apps will continue to function properly as before

Label Control

You will be able replace the standard ASP.NET Label within your web projects with a label control with the same look and feel as the rest of the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls. It will offer seamless integration with all components in the suite, along with rich feature server and client-side API for creating various captions for form editors. Its flexibility will allow you to specify the layout and positioning, as well as to customize its inner contents by adding icons and/or hyperlinks.

Chart Pan and Zoom

The long anticipated pan and zoom feature will help you and your end-users navigate through and zoom into or out of the RadHtmlChart.
 
Chart Pan and Zoom

Figure ​4: Use SHIFT + Mouse Drag Region Selection combination on mouse-enabled devices to zoom in data for a specific period of time

Responsive Toolbar

 Stretched Toolbar

Squeezed ToolbarThe responsive capabilities of the toolbar will allow you and your end-users to operate with its UI elements on small screen sizes like tablets or even smartphones. If there is not enough space the right placed tools will become part of the dropdown button context menu, as shown in the second screenshot.


Modern Rendering

The CloudUpload, DataForm, Gantt, MediaPlayer, ImageGallery, LightBox, ProgressBar, SiteMap, Spell, TagCloud and Wizard control will obtain light-weight and semantic rendering based on the latest trends in HTML5, CSS3 and font-icons, which will improve not only the appearance of your apps, but also their performance.


Rumen-Jekov
About the Author

Rumen Jekov

Rumen Jekov (@Rumen_Jekov) started his career at Telerik’s ASP.NET team in 2004 as a tech support engineer and passed through the position of a team lead to a product manager. He has answered more than 51,500 tickets helping customers to achieve their goals. Presently, he is a product owner of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX and a manager of the AJAX crew at Progress. Off work, he enjoys traveling across the globe, watching movies and tech shows, reading books and listening to podcasts.

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