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The second major release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX for 2016 is here, including a new Ripple effect in the Material theme, Theme Builder enhancements, improved controls and a new Outlook-inspired Visual Studio layout template.

As a Product Owner, I know how important the stability, overall look and performance of the UI components are for you, your managers and of course your clients. That is why we invested a serious amount of time during the last year to not only improve the UI and UX and limit the known bugs, but also to modernize the rendering and to ease the appearance customization.

We've got a lot of enhancements for you as part of R2'16, so let me dive deeper into the highlights.

Appearance Improvements

During the R2 session, we utilized the time to:

  • Unify the rendering on the form related controls: inputs, buttons, combos and checkboxes.
  • Add the famous Ripple effect to the Material skin to make your apps even more interactive and closer to Google's concept for the Material feeling.
    Material Theme Ripple Effect
  • Include the Material skin in the Theme Builder, which will soon allow you to create and customize themes based on the Material theme. We are currently testing the new functionality internally and it will go live in about a week.
  • Remove the hard-coded in the skins Font settings (see more here).
  • Enhance RadPanelBar’s appearance by making its normal, hover and active states of root items and collapse/expand handlers more consistent.
  • Increase the size of the RadEditor toolbar's icons and renovated the Table Wizard dialog.

We also worked on many more changes with the sole purpose of making the appearance of your apps better, modern and pixel perfect. 

New Highly Anticipated Features in the Controls

Upgraded Grid Performance

RadGrid now offers improved resizing performance, improved performance when RadRating is used inside the grid with enabled virtualization, and performance-optimized usage of the client set_value method of RadRating in GridRatingColumn.

For ease of use, we've added a built-in print button too:

RadGrid Print Button

Improved Spreadsheet Functionality

You can now populate the spreadsheet through the popular XLSX format on the client via the built-in MS Excel Import functionality. Yet another nice feature is that you can style the spreadsheet with any of the available built-in themes in the suit:
 

Spreadsheet Themes
 
 

Great Table Editing in RadEditor

The end-users are going to enjoy the improved UI for table editing and management, which will enrich their experience in desktop and mobile environment. The table wizard and editing features have been renovated and are easier to use than ever. We've also replaced the old context menus of RadEditor with RadMenu, which is not only more flexible, but also introduces support for sub-menus and easier skinning.
 

Table Management in RadEditor
 

New Getting Started Outlook-Inspired Template

The Outlook-inspired template joins the power of some of the most popular controls in the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX suite to create one of the most recognizable applications in the world—Microsoft Outlook. You can easily spot how RadGrid, RadButton, RadInput, RadScheduler and RadCalendar blend seamlessly.

The Visual Studio template can be used as a layout for a quick start of any other business application. The layout template is a light version of the WebMail sample app, built with Telerik ASP.NET AJAX components.

VS Outlook-inspired Тemplate
 

Additional Information About R2 2016

Curious to learn more about the release? Follow the links below:

Got Feedback?

If you have questions or comments regarding the R2'16 release, post them below. I'll be glad to answer them.

You can also post your suggestions or feature requests as well as vote for the existing ones in the AJAX Feedback portal.


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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