Following the ​fanfare from our huge Q3 2015 release of Kendo UI, it is time to unveil our plans for Kendo UI development for Q1 2016, and beyond. This includes not only new functionality slated for the Kendo UI framework, but also for our Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC, UI for JSP and UI for PHP products, all part of the Kendo UI Complete bundle.

Read on to see what's cooking in our labs, and expect the Q1 2016 release to ​go live in the middle of January 2016.

The Process of Defining a Roadmap

As much as shaping a roadmap may seem quite a trivial task at first sight, it is actually the final outcome of thorough internal discussions between our Engineering, Product Management and Product Strategy leads. It also requires the identification and prioritization of key customer stories ​for which we would like to provide solutions in the next development cycle. The important factors taken into account during this process are as follows:

• Industry research and analysis
• Direct customer surveys and feedback (including our UserVoice portal) 
• Forum posts and support requests
• Input from Telerik leadership

As visible from the bullets above, your feedback strongly influences the decision making process. It​'s a big part of what guides ​our development plans for providing web and mobile solutions with Kendo UI ​for you​ as a developer. When this data is carefully analyzed, correlated and mapped to key deliverables, the roadmap clicks in and is published on our site.

Given this insight, here are the main deliverables which we plan to pack into our Q1 2016 installment. 

Spreadsheet Goes Official

With the next major release of Kendo UI the Spreadsheet widget will go out of Beta and into RTM, wrapping the essential set of features for a spreadsheet component. This means you and your users will have the entire core functionality to ​employ Excel-like experiences into web apps, and process business data of any type​—financial, manufacturing, operational or other​—in a tabular format using modern and intuitive UI.



In addition to numerous enhancements, optimizations and small features, ​the Spreadsheet will also boast client import from Excel, significantly expanded client API and events, as well as a sample integration with the Kendo UI Chart widget.

Going beyond Q1, we'll look into the possibility of integrating mobile support for the spreadsheet​. We'll also continue to review and prioritize ​client requests posted on our feedback portal, weighing popular demand and votes as we ​plan future implementations. If you have anything pressing that you would like to suggest, or want to ​register your vote for an existing entry, now is the time to ​do that.

More Kendo UI App Templates and Visual Studio Project Templates

Within the next release cycle we plan to extend the set of Kendo UI App Templates introduced in Q3 2015 (see this blog post for reference) by including a dashboard-like template. You will be able to utilize and extend this simple pre-configured template, which will save you manual steps and coding when creating dashboard-like interfaces for the mobile web.
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Moreover, these templates will be integrated within MS Visual Studio as project templates, making them readily available for developers who prefer to use this popular IDE for web development.

Angular 2.0 and Web Components Integrations

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Going forward, we'll be updating the Angular 2.0 and Web Components Beta integration (introduced with Q3'15) with the future updates of the Angular framework, ​as well as the increased adoption of the Web Components standard by browser vendors.

Northwind Dashboard App - AngularJS version

As much as Kendo UI ​has been known for providing seamless integration with AngularJS almost since the inception of the popular JavaScript framework, we haven't had a complete and runnable complex sample app featuring this integration to-date. Well, this is going to change soon. We intend to host an Angular version of our Northwind Dashboard demo app (with downloadable source code) right in our online demos.



I'll also give you a hint​—you can even review the sample app implementation ​right now. It's freely accessible in our github repository here.
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Grid Features

The next version of Kendo UI will bring additions to the Grid widget filtering functionality as well. The Excel-like filter menu will be enhanced to support search capabilities and complex filter expressions, in addition to current support for checkboxes.



Furthermore, you will be able to filter by null/not null values, which presently is the #1 requested item on our feedback portal.

Extended Widget ​Functionality

​Additional improvements for Kendo UI widgets worth mentioning are:

• Option to disable calendar/date pickers dates (#2 voted item on our UV portal)
• Support for a child member being a root with multiple axis dimensions for the PivotGrid

Documentation Improvements

We'll also allocate some time for extending the content and beautifying our online documentation in terms of UX and navigation. ​This will be done in incremental steps, and you can already find the results of the first wave of our improvements right here.

ASP.NET MVC Server Wrappers

ASP.NET vNext Support

The new major version of the .NET framework continues to evolve towards its RC and RTM stages, planned tentatively for November 2015 and Q1 2016, respectively (see the public ASP.NET vNext Roadmap page ​on github for reference). We are closely following this schedule and our previous commitment stays the same—we plan to provide compatible versions for UI for ASP.NET MVC with vNext RC and RTM almost simultaneously with their announcements.

Note that tag helpers for ​the ASP.NET MVC server wrappers ​of Kendo UI widgets (where applicable) are also within our scope towards Q1.

Presently we support the latest ASP.NET MVC vNext Beta8 version, and you can download the compatible Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 Beta from our public NuGet feed. ​You can learn how to use it in ASP.NET vNext apps from this blog post.

New Visual Studio Dashboard Project Template

We'll also be expanding the set of predefined Visual Studio Project Templates for UI for ASP.NET MVC with a new Dashboard-like template, based on the Kendo UI App Template definition depicted in the previous section of this post.

In this way you'll be able to put this template into practice when building MVC applications with our ​UI for ASP.NET MVC product within Visual Studio.

Beyond Q1 2016

There are many more exciting new ​additions and themes coming up for Kendo UI in 2016! For now I can only mention that some of them revolve around ReactJS and ECMAScript 6, but I won't disclose more details ​just yet. Stay tuned for updates later in 2016, and start dreaming about how Kendo UI can make you a developer rockstar next year!

Your Thoughts?

Knowing what's coming in the first major release of Kendo UI in 2016 and onward, I can't wait to hear what you think about our plans. Be the first to share ​your opinion in the comments. Also ​keep in mind that we operate in a dynamic environment, and our preliminary plans might undergo some changes going forward.

​If you have suggestions or feature requests, ​visit our Feedback portal and submit them ​so they can be reviewed and voted on by the community, and prioritized for future development.