Although many deem WebForms an old-school technology, it’s still the most productive way to build web applications. This is why we continue to add tons of new functionality to each release of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX, to make sure you have everything you need to be productive, modern and competitive. Here are 4 things from the latest WebForms release I believe you’ll want to get into your projects ASAP.
Telerik ASP.NET Grid gets a new mobile-optimized user experience and rendering. You can easily turn it on by setting RenderMode=”Mobile” or RenderMode=”Auto”. The “Mobile” option will force the mobile rendering suitable for smartphone, tablets and other touch enabled devices. The “Auto” mode will make the grid choose the appropriate render mode according to the used browser, Classic or Mobile.
As you know, most other Telerik ASP.NET controls already feature mobile optimizations. You can check out their demos here.
As of the last release, we ship the Telerik Document Processing Library (DPL) at no additional cost with UI for ASP.NET AJAX. This means that with no additional effort you can enable users to create, load and modify documents in a variety of formats including: DOCX, RTF, TXT, HTML, PDF, XLSX, CSV, Tab-delimited.
With this release we are completing the integration between the ASP.NET controls and the DPL by adding support for it to RadGrid, RadEditor, RadTreeList and RadPivotGrid.
Over the past year, we have implemented HTML5-based lightweight rendering in most of our controls. With this release we introduce the render mode for RadEditor too.
It reduces the amount of markup the control renders and makes it easier to customize.
All of this decreases the overall size and complexity of each skin, including custom ones.
The new rendering also enables the elastic capabilities of the editor, which is a nice feature especially when developing responsive web sites. When rendered in lightweight mode RadEditor will adapts its interface to the specified font size without deteriorating its user experience.
You can check the screenshot and table below it for more detailed information on the improvements:
Render Mode | Lightweight | Classic |
Markup Size | 56.43 KB | 60.07 KB |
CSS Size | 55.3 KB | 86.8 KB |
Image Sprite/ Font Icons Size * | 72.5 KB | 56.2 KB |
* The Lightweight RenderMode of RadEditor uses font icons instead of image sprites for its tools' icons which have a much bigger size, but offer more benefits over the images that greatly facilitate the control’s customization.
All you need to do to turn on the new rendering is to set RenderMode="Lightweight", i.e.
<telerik:RadEditor ID="RadEditor1" runat="server" RenderMode="Lightweight"></telerik:RadEditor>
You can examine the lightweight editor in this demo.
With the introduction of the UpdateMode property to the WebServiceSettings, only the updated appointments are being sent back and forth to the WebService, decreasing dramatically the amount of data being sent when creating, editing or deleting appointments.
We’ve also made huge performance improvements in the client rendering when dealing with large amounts of appointments, resulting in up to 10 times faster rendering across all browsers.
The optimizations cover all operations, such as initial load, navigating through views and time periods, adding, updating and deleting appointments, both in Server and WebService binding.
Of course, there are hundreds more new and enhanced functionalities in the Q3 2014 release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX. For more details, check the What’s New product page or the Release Notes. Or, why not simply download the latest version and try the new stuff directly in Visual Studio? You can get the trial version from here.
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.