What's New in Q1 2012

 

The new volume of RadControls for Windows Phone features major additions to the suite in three main directions:

Check out also RadControls for Windows Phone featured on Channel 9. Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, the man responsible for the Windows Phone Developer Partner Program talks to our colleague Deyan Ginev. Watch video

Application Building Blocks

RadDiagnostics

When using RadDiagnostics in your app, you receive crash reports, get specific debug and run-time information from your end users when they encounter an issue (ApplicationUnhandledException) with your app. When an exception occurs, a MessageBox dialog is displayed and users are asked to report the diagnostics data. The collected data contains rich information about the exception, device and runtime info. Optionally a screenshot of the current application state can be provided. Read how to implement it and see a preview of how the report will look like in this blog post.

TrialReminder

It allows you to display reminder messages for the trial versions of your apps. You can track the usage of the different features and disable only some of them when the trial expires. Then you can display a nice message inviting your user to purchase the paid version or pay for premium content. The trial period can be tracked per days or per count of features usages. Read how to implement the TrialReminder control here.

RateAppReminder

Helping your app gets more ratings, which is one of the factors affecting greatly the app’s overall ranking. Our experience shows that if the users are reminded to do something, chances are that their response rate will be higher than if they are not reminded. With RadRateApplicationReminder you can configure your application to display a message box that reminds users to rate your application on every given period or for a given application usage. See how simple it is to implement the control.

LiveTileHelper

Based on feedback we got from customers we created this control so that you can easily create context specific, content-centric and dynamic tiles with custom design. A very common scenario is that you want to pin a page that has a dynamic (or user generated) content. In this case you can’t use a static image from your application or even a dynamic image from a web server because the content is very often created on the fly, but you can use the LiveTileHelper. Read more

New Components

Tooltip

This is a control that allows you to display a popup associated with a given visual element on your page. This popup may contain any type of information, like additional details or some hints. For example, the tooltip can show information for various subway stations on a subway map.

Rating

RadRating allows users to show their rating for anything … albums, movies etc. The Rating is applied by tapping an item. Each item’s shape and style is fully customizable.

Pagination

Using pagination, you can deliver rich content presentation in your Windows Phone application. This control allows you to enable your users navigate through multiple pages of whatever content you want by using simple and known gestures. Performance and UX are focus point here.

Element of Delight

SlideView Flip Transition

RadSlideView adds this cool flip transition, both with vertical and horizontal orientation. You can achieve this with a single property.

SlideView On-demand Loading

That’s another sweet new feature of the SlideView control. The app will load only the currently selected item, boosting the loading time of the app. You can also use a template to provide a light-weight snapshot of the two adjacent to the viewport items. But what does this mean to the user? It’s simple – he will have what he wants fast and he won’t get bored while waiting.

Check the example

DataBoundListBox Horizontal Scrolling

The ListBox now supports horizontal scrolling. You will not find this behavior in the Windows Phone toolbox.

DataBoundListBox Wrap Layout

This feature fully utilizes the UI Virtualization mechanism of the control and thus brings all of the performance benefits that RadDataBoundListBox delivers. The feature is in Beta version and all your feedback is very welcome.