Enjoy New Appearance Effects and More in UI for ASP.NET AJAX

See what's coming in the second major release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX for 2016, including new skin effects and enhancements.

Building on the changes we released in R1, some great skin effects and enhancements are coming in R2 2016 for Telerik ASP.NET AJAX. They will not only improve the look and feel of the controls, but also unify their rendering and make them more customizable—features requested by all of you!

Let me begin with the lovely and multi-functional ThemeBuilder, followed by a list of the most valuable improvements.

ThemeBuilder and More

The ThemeBuilder is going to become more powerful and allow you to create, improve and/or customize the Material, Silk, Glow and MetroTouch skins.

Along with them, you will be able to style all currently missing controls—Cloud Upload, Gantt, Media Player, Image Gallery, Light Box, Site Map, Spell, Spreadsheet and Wizard.

In addition, we will be looking into the possibility of including support for Bootstrap 4 Themes. This will allow you to import Twitter Bootstrap themes and convert them to Telerik skins that the controls can be styled with.

And that‘s not all! You’ll be able to take advantage of a number of underlying or visible improvements in the controls’ appearance, such as:

• Ripple effect for the Material Skin—yes, we know that this theme is very trendy and we will continue to enhance it.
  
• Silk and Glow skin refactoring and improvements.
• Remove font family and font size from the controls—this is pretty handy, because the controls will inherit the default font settings of the page where they reside. Due to the high flexibility of the controls’ rendering and you can always tweak them further and apply your own font settings.
• Font Icons enhancements to make the icons crisper and nicer looking, with unique identifiers.
• Focus and Active States of the controls.
• Primary buttons will be included in more controls to enrich their usability.

That’s not all, folks—the benefits for you are even bigger. They concern some of the most popular controls, including Spreadsheet, Grid and others. 

Spreadsheet

With the upcoming R1 2016 SP1 release, we are going to provide the full set of skins for the spread. Additionally the R2 release will bring you built-in import capabilities from the popular XLSX file format.

Grid

RadGrid will become more useful, with the following new features that we know the community has been anticipating:

• Built-in Print button
• Ability to hide the context button for some columns
• KeepInScreenBounds functionality for the Edit popup
• Persisting checked items in the check list filtering of the grid (Persistence Framework)

RadEditor

The Table Wizard and Management experience will be greatly enriched through the new context menu and redesigned Table Wizard.

New CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls

The new lightweight and easy to use RadCheckBoxList and RadRadioButtonList controls will be of help in your everyday work.

Useful How-To Articles and Advanced Tutorials

We do appreciate your valuable feedback from the annual AJAX survey 2015. We'll do our best to make the support resources—especially the "How-To" articles—more visible and accessible by search engines, and will produce even more useful tutorials. You can also expect a new Outlook-inspired Visual Studio project template as well as redesigned and modern looking Sales Dashboard sample app.

You can find more information on the roadmap at the What's Coming in R2 2016 page as well as to share your frank and valuable feedback in the comments section below.