Spinning RadCarousel

This is my first post, and by obligation I have to say a few words as an introduction. I’m Mihail Valkov, and I have been working on component development at Telerik for several years. I know my name comes a bit mouthful for many of you, so I'll just use Mike for short. I'm the guy behind some of our Windows Forms components and part of the team that created the great TPF. I am excited of the many good things to come in our WinForms offering in the near future and I am determined to keep you posted about them.

As you already know, we had a great experience last week on TechEd. We showed off yet another new app that seems to come from the WPF world, but is actually built using Widows Forms. This is possible thanks to our RadControls for WinForms and the TPF. To be more precise it was built using the RadCarousel control, some cool images and a couple hours of work to put them together in this great way:

It wouldn't be so easy without TPF and RadCarousel though. Even, if you think about the many hours you have to spend dealing with GDI+, imaging APIs I would say - it's simply not doable. Most probably, you would simply not want to spent so much time and effort on just creating that kind of UI, even though it’s pretty cool. But what if this comes really easy? And it actually does, if you use the RadCarousel control.

So here is what this app does. It animates some images through a virtual 3D ellipse, until the user hovers her mouse over any of them. A window pops-up upon clicking an item, animating some text and image items, in a Silverlight kind of fashion. The carousel control offers a simple yet elegant way to navigate though a bunch of items. And if the actual selection from a list of items is the piece of UI, you want to highlight in any Form in your app, the carousel control might offer your users a great experience.

I must say I was pretty pleased at TechEd, when anyone kept asking – “is this a WPF app” and I have been answering - no, this actually is a WinForms app, built using the Telerik tools. Ok, I know you can do a lot more with WPF, but my point is - if you care about the look and feel of your WinForms apps you still have an easy option - simply use RadControls on key places in your apps.

You might also find it interesting that we used only the Form's resx file and AppSettings to store all data about carousel items. This was possible because all carousel items are actually simple RadButtonElement items which appear as components in your designer. You can select and tweak them as you wish. In this case, we just bound some of their properties to AppSettings values.

This is just an example of how great Windows Forms features come together easy with RadControls.
Since there are some you already asking about this demo, I must say I'll be really excited to post this cool app on our Code Library right away. Some of the magic though will be available in Q2 version in about a month, so stay tuned ;)