Telerik DevCraft R1 2017 Release Webinar Recap

Join us as we recap our recent webinar for the R1 2017 release of the Telerik DevCraft development suite. Missed it? You can watch the recording on YouTube.

Last week, Burke Holland, Ed Charbeneau, Sam Basu, and I hosted a webinar that provided an overview of all the latest and greatest features we shipped in the R1 2017 release of Telerik DevCraft. This release featured many updates across our UI controls and development tools. A top highlight of this release is our commitment to Visual Studio 2017. We covered a massive amount of content that highlighted everything that is awesome in Telerik DevCraft. Other highlights included:

• An improved “getting started” experience for many products
• Numerous updates to Kendo UI for jQuery
• RC now available for Kendo UI for Angular
• Spreadsheet improvements in UI for ASP.NET AJAX and UI for ASP.NET MVC
• Bootstrap 4 theme development updates
• Updates to the Document Processing Library
• Updates to reporting

Relive the Webinar

If you were unable to watch the webinar, don’t worry. We posted the recording of the webinar up on YouTube for you to watch in its entirety and in high definition!

Prize Winners

Of course, it wouldn’t be a webinar by Progress without some cool prizes. This time around, we decided to give a prize to the attendee with the best question. We also picked a lucky attendee-at-random just to make things fun. Here are your winners:

Best question: Ross Toombs (Xbox One S)
Random winner: Jennifer Bartolome (Amazon Echo)

Congratulations to our winners!

Questions and Answers

We had a mountain of questions through our webinar software and online through Twitter. You can check out some of the questions that were asked by reviewing the #AskTelerik hashtag. Here’s a selection of a few that were asked and answered during the webinar.

Usually the release notes for UI for ASP.NET AJAX is packed with new features and for some reason on this version the list is very short. Is there a reason?
UI for ASP.NET AJAX is a mature product. We’re focused on compatibility with Visual Studio 2017 and fine tuning new additions like the SpreadSheet control that was released in late 2016.

Is there a path forward for using Kendo UI controls with React and Webpack? The tree-shaking features would be very useful to cut down the large size of the Kendo payload.
Yes! We have a set of wrappers available. More information is available in a blog post entitled, Kendo UI for React: The Road Ahead.

Does Kendo UI work in an offline scenario as well?
Absolutely. So long as you maintain data with the DataSource and ensure it’s re-populated between requests/pages/etc. it should work just fine.

Can we set a pattern for column values in the Grid component in Kendo UI for Angular for things like date, time, etc.?
You can use a cell template to control this behavior, about which you can read more in our documentation.

Can the rendering of the Grid component in Kendo UI for Angular be suspended during updates to improve performance?
That sounds like you’re loading a lot of data. If so, you may want to consider paging or virtualization.

What sorts of project templates will be included in Visual Studio 2017?
Everything you had with previous versions will be available in Visual Studio 2017 as well.

How do I get the Color Theme Generator that was shown with UI for WPF?
Here's the Color Theme Generator for XAML.

Is there a plan for Reporting to be available on mobile application development?
We are thinking in this direction. Stay tuned!

The RadPdfViewer includes forms? Can I access them from code?
Currently it displays forms. Editing them is currently cooking. :) Accessing them in code is not yet possible.

Are the Kendo UI Sass compilation options the same as the Bootstrap Sass? This is important for compatibility.
The Sass variables are compatible with Bootstrap 4.

Does UI for Xamarin’s ListView have support for virtualized (or lazy loading/infinite scrolling) large datasets?
Yes, absolutely! ListView for Xamarin.iOS extends the standard UICollectionView and ListView for Xamarin.Android extends the Android RecyclerView. This provides fast loading and smooth scrolling experience even for large data sets.

NuGet for Telerik includes more packages than Xamarin? Please elaborate.
Please check out the blog post entitled, We Maintain a Telerik NuGet Feed for detailed information about this.

WinForms UI is there any tools or methods to build a small app as a single file (without dll’s and so on)?
Yes, there is. Once you build the app, you can ILmerge it into one file. We have a section in our documentation that elaborates on this point further.

In future we want to build our new apps for multiple Mobile devices and platforms as HTML SPI and use Electron / Cordova to make them running. How could Telerik help us best for this scenario?
We’re fond of Electron. You should look into our web suites like Kendo UI and Cordova tooling like AppBuilder.

Have you ever considered selling non-commercial Kendo UI licenses?
Check out Kendo UI Core on GitHub! It’s free and open source!

Is there a PDF stream writer for ASP.NET?
You can create PDFs with ASP.NET using our Document Processing Library.

Is there anything in the Document Processing Library to convert dynamic .aspx or HTML pages to PDFs or Word documents?
No, not directly. But, our UI controls can do something similar in a variety of ways.

In a recent web project using Kendo widgets in conjunction with Bootstrap, I have to add some stylesheet theming to “fix” issues with numeric tool box, etc. Have there been improvements so that this additional CSS is no longer necessary??
Yes, we’ve been working on updating to the Bootstrap theme. However, please submit any bugs you find. We’d love to hear about them. Sorry about that. If you want, you can check out our GitHub repo that’s focused on this work. Alternatively, there’s our repo for the default theme as well.

When will VS 2017 RC be fully supported by DevCraft? I tried to install DevCraft on the RC and it wasn’t an option. I installed it on 2015 instead.
VS 2017 is DEFINITELY listed when you install bits via the Telerik Control Panel. You may have to update to the latest version. You’ll see a prompt to update when you run the utility.

Thank You

Thanks to everyone who joined in the webinar or asked questions, and if you missed it, please watch the recording and let us know what you think of the latest DevCraft release.