Mobile, Line of Business and ClientDataSource controls in Q2 2014 of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX

The Q2 2014 release of Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX is out and I am excited to share with you the highlights with highest impact on your development.
 

What’s New in Q2’14? What are the Benefits for You?

The release introduces four new controls in your Visual Studio toolboxes that will empower your line of business application:

• Gantt (Beta)
• Diagrams (Beta)
• Map
• ClientDataSource

It also introduces mobile and responsive capabilities in fifteen existing controls. The Page Layout control that helps you build responsive projects for mobile, touch-enabled and desktop devices is now official.

Let’s dive deeper into the new functionalities and use case scenarios.

Gantt (Beta)

The planning and roadmap-related tasks are some of my favorite Product Manager responsibilities. Starting with Q2 2014, I will be able to store the product development ideas, track and manage their progress, prioritize tasks and visualize them in three different ways (day, month and year views) with our own Gantt control. It offers great user experience and despite being in a beta, it offers all common features for a fluent and flawless workflow.

This project management tool will allow you to easily manage and visualize project data such as product planning, creation and implementation along with important milestones. For more information explore the Gantt live demos.

Note: The Beta features only the default skin. The other ones will become available in the official release.

Diagrams (Beta)

The popular ASP.NET AJAX Diagram control was released as a beta two months ago (April 23, 2014). We plan to keep its beta status till the next major release when it will offer better browser, mobile, keyboard support and improved UX. You can find detailed information about the control itself in this blog post and its live demos.

To see and experience the full potential of the diagram control check out the new ASP.NET Diagram Sample Application. It’s intended to show you how to build a real life Diagramming application in cooperation with other Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls. You will find an extensive whitepaper with the details in its About page.

Map

The Map control, based on the Kendo UI Map widget, allows you to add and control predefined layouts, markers, tooltips, zoom levels, UI elements and many more.

Here are some scenarios you can achieve using RadMap:

• A very common scenario for corporate sites is to use a map for visualizing the company’s offices around the globe. This case is shown in this demo.
• Another common scenario is drawing alternative routes between points in a city for pedestrian, bicycles and vehicle.
• The Map is not limited to describing geographic features only. By using Shape layers bound to GeoJSON data, RadMap can display both geographical and custom shapes making the control useful for a wide spectrum of scenarios. It will allow you visualize anything from countries and continents to movie theaters and stadium plans. You can also use the Map to show the temperature, earthquakes or other informative data as shown here.

 

ClientDataSource

RadClientDataSource is powered by the Kendo UI DataSource framework. It allows you to populate all Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls that have client-side binding capabilities on the client in seconds and perform CRUD data operations, as well as sorting, paging, filtering, and grouping entirely on the client.

I suggest you to test the performance of the controls bound to the ClientDataSource and see how much faster they behave once populated with data on the client. The Live demos are available here.

Mobile and Responsiveness

The Q2’14 is a milestone release for the ASP.NET AJAX mobile and responsive story. The Page Layout control becomes official and 15 more controls gain responsive, elastic and adaptive capabilities to help you build apps with UX tailored to any device: 

•  Page Layout - The control now supports more complex layouts, sticky headers and footers and nested rows. You can examine the Responsive Web Design demo to see the integration of Page Layout in it.
• Responsive Rotator and Slider 
• Adaptive LightBox and Media Player
• Elastic AutoCompleteBox, ComboBox, DropDownList, ListBox, SearchBox, Slider, TagCloud, Rotator, Input, Calendar, Menu, Treeview and DropdownTree
• Improved gestures support in Grid, Slider and LightBox:

You can find a detailed list with all responsive, elastic, fluid and adaptive capacities of the controls here.

Other Important News

Integration with the Telerik Document Processing Library

As part of the UI for ASP.NET AJAX distribution, you gain access to Telerik Document Processing Library which lets you manage documents within your app with ease. Full-blown integration with all controls is expected in Q3. The currently possible integration is:  

• DOCX and RTF import/export for RadEditor
• Export to Excel for RadGrid, RadPivotGrid and RadTreeList
  
  

More details about each scenario will follow in the Export section of each control’s documentation once the feature is available.

Discontinuation of Internet Explorer 6 Support

I’m using the opportunity to remind you that IE6 is no longer supported by UI for ASP.NET AJAX as of Q2 2014, which will allow us to optimize the code, CSS and skins for the AJAX controls. Read details in this blog post: IE6 is not supported by Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX as of June 2014. If you have any comments please post them there.

Additional Resources

Some quick links that will give you a head-start:

Release Notes,
What's New,
Trial download,
Online demos,
Documentation

Your feedback is always highly appreciated!

I hope that you’ll enjoy the new stuff and I will be happy to hear your feedback. Leave your thoughts as comments under this post or in the Feedback portal. 

Register for the DevCraft Q2 Online Conference

Don’t miss the chance to register for our What's New Conference on June 24 at 11am ET. The main theme is Tips for Building Mobile-Optimized ASP.NET Projects”. There will be also a demonstration of the APIs for processing the most common document formats: DOCX, RTF, XLSX, CSV, and PDF that will enable you to embed, load, create, convert and print documents directly within your apps, without Microsoft Office, or any other external library.