Many users have asked the question “What are the differences between your controls and their equivalents in the Microsoft’s Toolkit for WP7”. With this article I will try to give you a more detailed perception on the added value of RadControls for Windows Phone 7.
Please note that this is “our” point of view and how we see the differences between our suite and the Toolkit. We by no means belittle the efforts of Microsoft’s team that created such a nice components package.
I will list only the components/features that are present both in Telerik’s suite and the Toolkit. All of the features that are unique for Telerik only are bolded.
Page transitions are encapsulated by the root application visual - RadPhoneApplicationFrame, which uses the power of RadTransitionControl to define smooth and slick animations upon page load and unload. Four distinctive types of animation flow are defined within a transition: ForwardIn, ForwardOut, BackwardIn and BackwardOut, each one being freely modifiable either by code or through XAML. Each transition synchronizes events like Loaded, LayoutUpdated and CompositionTarget.Rendering so that the animation is as smooth as possible. Due to this synchronization mechanism even heavy pages such as Panorama or Pivot with lots of content are easily animated without any performance or visual impact.
Here is a list with all the transitions that come out of the box with Telerik’s package:
These are selection tools that mimic the native controls found within the WP7 OS. The innovative user experience allows for infinite looping of all the three Date (or Time) components - Day, Month, Year (or Hour, Minute, TimeOfDay) where the middle selected items in each of the three lists form the desired Date/Time.
Following is a list of the features that are present within these controls:
| Frame rate | Fill rate |
Telerik | 48-50 | 1.2099 |
MS Toolkit | 35-37 | 2.3592 |
Notes | In the Toolkit’s control you will experience significant delay when switching among the looping lists within the selectors while scrolling. |
Represents a Selector control that initially displays the currently selected item only and may be expanded in two different modes:
Following are the features available in the control:
A predefined Panel implementation that positions its child elements sequentially from left to right or top to bottom. When an element extends beyond the panel edge, it is positioned in the next row/column respectively. RadWrapPanel adds the IsAnimated property that allows child elements to be nicely animated when you add or remove elements dynamically.
If you haven't a copy of our RadControls for Windows Phone 7 grab one directly on your phone from the Market Place or download a fully functional trial of our current CTP2 release. Do not hesitate to share your thoughts and feedback with us on what can be further improved in our suite and what functionality we should add to meet your requirements and expectations.
I will keep this post updated when new equivalent controls are added in both suites so that you may easily find out the differences.
Georgi worked at Progress Telerik to build a product that added the Progress value into the augmented and virtual reality development workflow.