Kendo UI for Angular 2 Is Now a Release Candidate

Kendo UI for Angular 2 is now available as a release candidate, and we invite anyone with a Kendo UI license to try it out today. Learn more by registering for our release webinar.

Today is a big day for us! After several months of hard work, we reached the moment when we can announce our Angular 2 UI Suite—Kendo UI for Angular 2 as a Release Candidate (RC).

What Does the RC Label Mean?

Traditionally, release candidate phase means that the product is complete in terms of major features, and accurately matches the final vision. We received plenty of feedback during the beta phase, and we may confirm that the major decisions we made are here to stay. We are comfortable enough to label the current release with a go-live license. As far as the features—we are working hard on adding the essential ones for the next major release. We are committed to following the continuous release process, so new features in the components will be released as soon as they are ready.

To back this up, we are going to treat the product as part of our Kendo UI offering and provide commercial support through our dedicated support channel. Going forward, to use Kendo UI for Angular 2, you need an active license for one of the bundles which include Kendo UI: Kendo UI Professional, Kendo UI Complete, DevCraft Complete or DevCraft Ultimate.

Also we need to mention a small nuance on the product naming. If you are following the Angular space, you will have noticed that the Angular team is dropping versioning when referring to the Angular JS framework. So, as we are committed to moving in lock-step with advancements in Angular, moving forward we are removing versioning from our product and will be calling it Kendo UI for Angular as the official product name. You can still expect documentation and learning resources to refer to appropriate version of Angular. Lastly, if you are looking into development in Angular 1.x and Kendo UI, you should use Kendo UI for jQuery as it has wrappers which will suit your needs. 

Two Common Questions

I own a license for Kendo UI Professional or Kendo UI Complete. Does this mean that I get a license for Kendo UI for Angular 2 once it becomes final?

Yes, you got that right. And this is here to stay.

Talking about that, when is the final release of Kendo UI for Angular 2 coming?

Glad you asked. The final release (R2 2017) is scheduled for May 3^rd.

What's New

The release includes several brand new form components: Autocomplete, MultiSelect, NumericTextBox and MaskedTextBox. The Grid component got two of its most wanted features: editing and grouping. The upload received necessary feature updates, the most notable one being the forms support.

The list does not stop here; Earlier in the quarter we released support for some of the framework fundamentals—AoT and Universal Rendering. We listened to your feedback in GitHub and addressed more than a hundred issues. We talked with you in Stack Overflow, so that the common gotchas and problems have easy to find answers. 

Coming Soon

A roadmap wouldn't be truly ambitious if it delivered 100% of its goals. There are a couple of things which did not make it for the release. We are working hard on delivering the DateInput and the Calendar. The Toolbar internals (SplitButton and DropDownButton) are already here, but the ToolBar component will follow through shortly.

Learn More with a Walkthrough or a Webinar

Meanwhile, there is a lot to look at! Follow the installation process from our getting started page, which also gently touches on the Angular 2 bits. To learn more about the release and see how the new components work, register for our launch webinar.