RadControls for WPF Control Suites is ready for VS2012 RTM! Are you?

Introduction

Here at Telerik, we live on the cutting edge. We were the first vendor to release controls for a variety of Microsoft technologies, including RadControls for Windows Phone and RadControls for Metro. We also pride ourselves for being compatible with the latest version of Microsoft’s IDE. We are happy to announce today that RadControls for WPF fully support Visual Studio 2012 RTM.

To get started using the new controls log into your account and select the product you are interested in or use the new control panel to grab them all at once.

Let’s Take a Quick Look at VS2012 RTM and our RadControls

Once everything is installed, launch VS2012 RTM and navigate the project tree until you find the Telerik Project Templates. You will notice that the WPF project templates in VS2012 RC look very similar to what they did in VS2010 as shown in Figure 1.

The only difference you should notice is the color scheme selected by Microsoft. If you select Telerik-> Windows -> C# RadControls for WPF Application and select OK, you will get a familiar a project configuration wizard.

Place a check in Telerik.Windows.Controls.Chart and you will notice that the dependent references are added automatically for you. You can switch over to the MainWindow.xaml and see the Telerik XML Namespace has been added as well.
Open the VS2012 Toolbox and you will also see all of our other RadControls are available to drag and drop just like they were in VS2010.

Drill into the Telerik Visualization 2012 Q2 and drag and drop RadPieChart from the ToolBox onto the designer to see the SmartTag Wizards just like before.

You can even use the new Blend support inside of VS2012 to make adjustments to our chart, with things such as Height, Width and so forth.

Let’s go ahead and use the SmartTag to generate XAML for a simple pie chart, go ahead and select the second pie chart in the wizard. You should notice the XAML has been generated for you automatically as shown below.

<Grid>
        <telerik:RadPieChart HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="107,86,0,0"   
                 VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="148" Width="156">
            <telerik:PieSeries>
                <telerik:PieSeries.DataPoints>
                    <telerik:PieDataPoint Value="9"/>
                    <telerik:PieDataPoint Value="3"/>
                    <telerik:PieDataPoint Value="3"/>
                </telerik:PieSeries.DataPoints>
                <telerik:PieSeries.SliceStyles>
                    <Style TargetType="{x:Type Path}">
                        <Setter Property="Fill" Value="#00B8FF"/>
                    </Style>
                    <Style TargetType="{x:Type Path}">
                        <Setter Property="Fill" Value="#FFFF5B00"/>
                    </Style>
                    <Style TargetType="{x:Type Path}">
                        <Setter Property="Fill" Value="#FF5AA4D4"/>
                    </Style>
                </telerik:PieSeries.SliceStyles>
            </telerik:PieSeries>
        </telerik:RadPieChart>
    </Grid>

Metro Theme

While we are at it, let’s go ahead and add in the Metro Theme provided out of the box by Telerik by adding Telerik.Windows.Themes.Metro.dll from the References dialog. This will allow our application to have a metro look-and-feel with minimal effort.

Switch back to your XAML view and add the following code snippet to the Pie Chart declaration telerik:StyleManager.Theme="Metro". The completed MainWindow.xaml.cs should look like the following.

<Grid>
        <telerik:RadPieChart telerik:StyleManager.Theme="Metro"  
           HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="107,86,0,0"   
           VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="148" Width="156">
            <telerik:PieSeries>
                <telerik:PieSeries.DataPoints>
                    <telerik:PieDataPoint Value="9"/>
                    <telerik:PieDataPoint Value="3"/>
                    <telerik:PieDataPoint Value="3"/>
                </telerik:PieSeries.DataPoints>
                <telerik:PieSeries.SliceStyles>
                    <Style TargetType="{x:Type Path}">
                        <Setter Property="Fill" Value="#00B8FF"/>
                    </Style>
                    <Style TargetType="{x:Type Path}">
                        <Setter Property="Fill" Value="#FFFF5B00"/>
                    </Style>
                    <Style TargetType="{x:Type Path}">
                        <Setter Property="Fill" Value="#FF5AA4D4"/>
                    </Style>
                </telerik:PieSeries.SliceStyles>
            </telerik:PieSeries>
        </telerik:RadPieChart>
    </Grid>

As you can see, all of the functionality that you have grown to love in VS2010 is here right now in VS2012 RTM. This of course not only includes WPF, but all of our product suites.

And there’s more...

We have numerous features added to each control suite that I want to point out before you go.

For WPF, we just introduced Service Pack 1 which includes:

• PivotGrid CTP : The first public version of RadPivotGrid for Silverlight and WPF is available in the Q2 2012 SP1 release as a CTP. The control has all the basic features, such as sorting, grouping, filtering, scrolling (vertical and horizontal), etc.
• All Controls: Numerous bug fixes and additions such as LineSeries, AreaSeries, SplineSeries, SplineAreaSeries UI Virtualization for ChartView and much much more.

Wrap-Up

As you can see RadControls for WPF is ready for VS2012 RTM right now. You can go ahead and safely upgrade to the latest version knowing that Telerik controls will work properly in the new IDE. Again, if you have any questions, feel free to reply to this post or send me a tweet.