My colleague Hristo Deshev just announced the availability of Telerik RadControls for WPF Beta2. This is a very important release not only because it brings so many new features and controls for WPF, but because this is our first release that includes the Silverlight and WPF controls under a single distributable.
For this first release we ported just a few Silverlight controls for WPF (namely TreeView, PanelBar, Calendar, DatePicker, Slider, ProgressBar and NumericUpDown), but in the long run almost all Silverlight controls that are applicable in a desktop scenario will be included in the WPF suite.
What does this mean to you as a developer? Why is this important? The biggest advantage of this decision is that you will be able to share the code that you write with our components with no changes between the WPF and Silverlight platforms. You get exactly the same API, exactly the same features and styles for each and every Telerik control you are using. This also means that your learning curve for using the controls for both platforms is cut in half - once you can write applications for Silverlight, you are ready to write them in WPF too. Isn't this great?
This is just the first step - we will add more value to our Silverlight and WPF suites for Q2 2008 which is already knocking on the door. Right after Q2 some major new controls will be introduced - so, just stay tuned and keep the feedback coming!
Valentin Stoychev (@ValioStoychev) for long has been part of Telerik and worked on almost every UI suite that came out of Telerik. Valio now works as a Product Manager and strives to make every customer a successful customer.