Desktop: WinForms

Cool top secret features fascinate me. Remember the hidden “Easter eggs” game in Excel 2002 (http://www.j-walk.com/ss/excel/eastereg.htm)? Don’t you love it when developers pull something up from their sleeve, which is so cool, people just brag about it for years? Truth to be told, we have a secret feature in RadTreeView for WinForms as well. It may be not as cool as the “Easter eggs” Excel game, but is something I wanted to share with you for some time now. I like this one, because it is our small secret weapon in the war for dominating the world of software features. RadTreeView has...

We at Telerik know that you, our clients, do not like breaking changes. With each release we get complaints that something has changed, even when it as small as a change in the name of a single property. We understand why you find them dreadful. More often than not software vendors do not speak of them openly and try to hide them at all costs. Often such changes are not well documented. As a result, a lot of time is spent on getting all issues resolved after the upgrade. We know that you are terrified from this process and prefer...

We have received several requests so far by customers who one way or another ask for the same thing: "Can you make your WPF controls in such a way that later when I convert my WinForms application (which use your WinForms controls) to WPF I wouldn't need to deal with different APIs and inconsistencies?".   In general, this could be achieved if we had: the same feature set in these two product lines the same API for our WinForms controls and WPF controls The first point is feasible and we'll do our best to do it.   The second, however, is something we probably won’t do....

It’s an interesting question that I got from a customer at a conference recently. He was wondering why we entered the Windows Forms space when we were a few years late compared to the other vendors and WPF was knocking on the door.  There were a couple of reasons – we have a passion at Telerik to bring controls to Microsoft developers on whatever platform they are developing on. Also at the time we wanted to take the challenge to create desktop UI components where there was no market for WPF. WPF technology was changing from release to release which lead...

As promised, I am following up with the second part of the work we have done on RadGridView during the past release. If you have read the first part, you would remember that our goal was to provide a stable, fast and usable GridView product which has to live up to Telerik’s high standards. In  Re-engineering RadGridView for WinForms (part I) I talked about: Improvements to the UI and element painting in the Telerik Presentation Framework (TPF), which raised RadGridView’s painting speed with some 30-60%, depending on the scenario the grid is used in;  Performance improvements in the data layer, which had an astonishing...