Chatbots for Web Forms with Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX [New Release]

The R2 2018 release of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX is here, complete with a new Conversational UI component, an upgraded internal version of jQuery to 3.3.1 and more!

Well hello there ASP.NET AJAX developers! Are you ready to kick off your summer with a brand-spanking new set of updates and features to Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX? The wait is over - R2 2018 for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX is here!

Let's dive in to some of the new components and features we added with this release. 😃

Chatbots via the Conversational UI Component

You've probably heard a lot about AI with the latest announcements at Google I/O and Microsoft Build. While these conferences highlighted the importance of services they offer today, we have already seen this trend happening for quite some time now.

As a part of this trend we wanted to let developers easily take advantage of these services within their applications. This is why I'm extra happy to announce that with R2 2018 we have added the new Conversational UI component to Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX:

This component is intended to be used with various chat bot services so Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX developers can easily drag-and-drop the component and add some chatbot features in your applications. We've added this across the board for all of our products in the Telerik DevCraft collection, and Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX is no exception.

Some of the features include:

• Built-in hero cards
• Built-in suggested actions
• Built-in simple message and typing indicator
• Custom card/attachment templates
• Easy connectivity to chat bot services (Azure/Microsoft Bot Framework, Wit.ai, Amazon Lex)

For more information you can jump over to our Conversational UI Overview page which covers not only the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX component, but everything that we've launched across all of our UI component libraries.

Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX Now Uses jQuery 3.3.1

jQuery has come quite a long way since we started using it internally with our Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX components. For a long time we have tried to support as many of our developers as possible by offering support for jQuery 1.11.x+ as the internal version used by our components. However, while this has worked well for backwards compatibility it also comes at a cost, with extra code for browsers which we no longer support (IE 6 & 7 for example). While we have allowed developers to use their own version of jQuery along with our components we've received a ton of feedback around the usage of 1.x and how folks want to see an upgrade.

As a part of our ongoing commitment to ASP.NET AJAX developers staying current we have therefore gone through and upgraded the internal version of jQuery to 3.3.1! This means that if you've been using our version of jQuery to write JavaScript code within your applications you will now be taking advantage of a new version of jQuery.

Of course, if you want to keep on using an older version of jQuery (or just your own version) you can certainly do so following the guidelines outlined in this documentation article.

General Updates

Beyond what I've covered so far we've also done a ton of work under the hood. While this is expected from many of our releases I wanted to highlight that we've tackled some outstanding bugs and issues that have been reported, including updating TypeScript definitions for developers working with TypeScript and our WebForms components.

Watch the Webinar

While I've been able to cover everything at a high level here there's plenty more to see. We've done a whole slew of updates across our other UI component libraries, which you can learn more about from the R2 2018 release webinar recording.

Watch the Webinar

Got Feedback?

As always we're looking to hear from you about any of our releases! Feel free to provide your impressions of our release in the comments section below, or you can always head over to our online feedback portal to vote on your favorite features or add in your own feedback items!