RadControls for Windows Phone 7 Q1 2011 Beta 2 released

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of our RadControls for Windows Phone 7 Q1 2011 Beta 2 release. Along with numerous bug fixes and further polish of the suite we are also introducing several cool new features, namely:

Complete design-time support for RadGauge:

You will be able to select among several (many more to come for the official release) predefined Gauge templates through an intuitive User Interface directly in Visual Studio.

RadLoopingList replaces RadInfiniteListBox

The First Look example in our demo application. Three RadLoopingList instances are used to infinitely scroll 24 images.

A list-box like example

RadLoopingList may be used as a super-fast and light-weight list box with smooth scrolling in some specific scenarios where:

• All items are of fixed and equal height (64 pixels in the example).
• All data items are pre-loaded. No dynamic changes within the data source are available at this point.
• Data templates are light-weight otherwise performance will degrade. Since scrolling is handled on the UI thread to provide immediate synchronization with the UI thread, heavy data templates are not handled well. In such cases RadDataBoundListBox is the best approach.

Complete localization support

All internally used strings are now localizable through RadLocalizationManager. Two separate mechanisms are available – either by using Resource files or directly through code by utilizing an IStringResourceLoader instance. We will prepare a separate blog post that describes in-depth how to localize an application using our tools.

A complete list with all the bug fixes and new features in this release may be found here. Do not hesitate to download the latest version and to leave us any feedback you may have – it will help us to build even greater tools