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We are very proud to announce that once again Telerik is first to market, this time with a suite of controls for Windows 8 Metro programming that are 100% Betacompatible with the release of Visual Studio 2012 and the release of Windows 8 RTM.

What’s In RadControls For Metro?

RadControls For Metro is a new suite of controls targeted directly at Windows 8 development, whether your language of choice is C#/XAML or Javascript/HTML5.  The suite includes a number of controls that are not in the Windows 8 Toolbox, along with a few controls that offer more powerful versions of standard controls. Each of these controls is completely consistent with the Windows 8-style look and feel. 

Download Telerik Windows 8 UI Controls.

Getting Started

While RadControls For Metro are still in Beta, you can download them and start working with them today.  You will find sample programs, extensive documentation and our world-famous support, just as you would expect. 

Install the RadControls for Metro and when you create a XAML or HTML project, the controls are available for you to drop into place in either Visual Studio 2012 or Blend for Visual Studio 2012.  You can set the HTML, CSS or Attributes on the control to tailor its behavior and appearance to your needs.

Our Beta license allows you to deploy your apps built with RadControls For Metro to the Windows Store right away.  Please refer to the EULA for more details.

What’s In the RadControls For Metro Collection?

RadChart is designed to help you create amazing visualizations. It supports various chart-series such as Bar, Line, Area, Pie and Scatter charts. You can create Pie charts, and Financial series, as well as Radar and Polar series charts.  All of these are built with performance as a priority and provide the ultimate experience on any device and screen-size running Windows 8 Metro. 

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Working with the charts is straight forward; exactly like working with any of the built-in controls that come with Visual Studio 12.  You declare your chart type and then set attributes and properties.  Here, for example, is the XAML to create a PieChart control with data on the division of a budget.  The ViewModel retrieves the data (either static data or data from a web service) and serves as the DataContext for the chart,

        <telerik:RadPieChart Palette="{Binding DefaultLightPalette}">
            <telerik:PieSeries
                ItemsSource="{Binding Data}"
                RadiusFactor="0.75">
                <telerik:PieSeries.ValueBinding>
                    <telerik:PropertyNameDataPointBinding PropertyName="Millions" />
                </telerik:PieSeries.ValueBinding>
                <telerik:PieSeries.LabelDefinitions>
                    <telerik:ChartSeriesLabelDefinition Margin="-20">
                        <telerik:ChartSeriesLabelDefinition.Binding>
                            <telerik:PropertyNameDataPointBinding
                                PropertyName="Department" />
                        </telerik:ChartSeriesLabelDefinition.Binding>
                    </telerik:ChartSeriesLabelDefinition>
                </telerik:PieSeries.LabelDefinitions>
            </telerik:PieSeries>
        </telerik:RadPieChart>

This same pie chart can, of course, be created in HTML,
<p>Create a sample pie chart</p>
    <div data-win-control="Telerik.UI.RadChart" 
             data-win-options="{series:[{type:'pie',data:[20, 30, 40, 10]}]}"></div>

And provide its look and feel in CSS

Telerik Gauges provide a rich assortment of radial, numeric and linear gauge types, with powerful customization capabilities, perfect for displaying distance, speed, duration or other dynamic data.  You can easily distinguish important metrics by selecting among predefined indicators like arrow, bar, segment, etc.

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The Telerik Bullet Graph provides data visualization to concisely describe a single datum (the featured measure) compared to one or two additional data (the comparative measures). You can get instant access to the overall progress of a process or task such as year-to-date sales over a projected target. RadBulletGraph can be positioned horizontally or vertically.

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DatePicker and TimePicker allow the user to scroll the relevant elements (day/month/year or hour/minutes) quickly and easily. The innovative user experience allows for infinite looping of all the components. You get much faster and smoother performance on start up.

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DropDownList is useful when you want to limit the user’s selection to a single item from a predefined list. You can populate the list with data from a local array or remote data from an online service, and you can add, remove and disable items at runtime.

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NumericBox provides precise control over changing numeric values in your application. It provides increment and decrement buttons that allow the user to change the value with a predefined step.

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AutoCompleteBox provides Google-like suggestions as you type, and allows the user to select two or more items. You can populate the AutoCompleteBox from a local array or remote data from an online service.

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Our Slider is much more powerful than the Slider control included in the Windows 8 toolbox, offering two thumbs to more precisely adjust a range of values.

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Similarly, our ComboBox for Metro is much more powerful than what  comes out of the Win 8 box, offering Google-like suggestions and auto-complete as you type. Besides selecting an item from the ComboBox’s drop down list, you can enter custom text in the textbox area. ComboBox can be populated either by a local array or remote data like movies database or list of stocks coming from an online service.

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Providing Feedback & Getting Questions Answered

We are eager to hear about your experiences with the RadControls for Metro.  We are in Beta and your feedback can have a dramatic impact on the final version. Please do leave your feedback and questions in our forum

Learning More

We recently had a Webinar introducing these controls. You can download the webinar, slides and code here, and review the complete Q&A from the webinar here.

The Metro controls come with extensive documentation, and we’ll be supplementing that documentation not only with Webinars but with blog posts, white papers, videos and more. Make sure that you regularly check our resources for easier Windows 8 app development.

All of this is supplemented by a series of blog posts and videos, starting with Michael Crump’s Why Would You Want to Write Applications for Windows 8 Now? and Jesse Liberty’s What’s Missing From The Windows 8 Toolbox and How Telerik Can Fill In The Gaps?


jesseLiberty
About the Author

Jesse Liberty

 has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects. He is the author of 2 dozen books and has been a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T and a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. You can read more on his personal blog or follow him on twitter

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