Toolbox, DataGrid, Numeric and More in R1 2018 of UI for Xamarin

The first major release of 2018 for the Progress Telerik developer tools is here, and it’s jam packed with new productivity features and controls for the Telerik UI for Xamarin suite.

Toolbox Support

With the new version of Telerik UI for Xamarin you can start your projects even faster, and we make you super-productive when creating Xamarin apps in Visual Studio with the new toolbox window. Simply drag the control from the toolbox to your Xaml page and it will add you a control ready to use – just what you are familiar with in all other traditional Microsoft development platforms.

The Xamarin DataGrid is Now Official

We’ve applied all the 15 years of experience that we have creating data grids for Microsoft development platforms, combined it with past five years in developing award winning mobile tooling and frameworks, and are now able to provide you an outstanding data grid for Xamarin.

DataGrid is now official, speeding up your development and allowing you to set up data intensive scenarios, both for phones and tablets. It enables you to use its dynamic binding to Enumerable.

Data Operations UI

DataGrid uses a parallel engine to perform its data operations such as filtering, grouping and sorting. Up until now you would need to build and set the appropriate data descriptors from code.

DataGrid now allows you to use its UI to apply sorting, filtering and grouping dynamically. It generates the UI based on the column type – for example, the filtering of dates, numeric and string data can be done directly from the UI. It also allows you to build your own filtering control UI for any specific data type. In addition, the user can choose the order and the number of visible columns using our column chooser.

Customizations

RadDataGrid offers fine-grained customization options – from the header, content, data indicators and gridlines to row and cell styles and alternation. It also allows the user to use style and template selectors to achieve the desired scenario.

Editing

Whenever you need cell editing functionality, DataGrid has the solution. Each column automatically defines its own editor based on the type of data used.

Load on Demand

Loading a large data set on a mobile device has its challenges. One of the most popular approaches is using incremental data loading as additional items need to be visualized, or on demand by user. Telerik UI for Xamarin DataGrid offers the ability to load the data items using automatic loading once you scrolled to the last available record or by displaying a customizable button which will initiate loading more data items.

Localization

DataGrid is fully localizable, giving you control over localizing the strings in filtering, load on demand and data UI.

New Control: Numeric Input

Almost every input scenario requires number entering. To achieve it easily we have developed the Numeric Input control in Telerik UI for Xamarin, covering these cases in all of the target platforms – iOS, Android and UWP. In addition, the Numeric Input control gives you control over the appearance of things like the foreground, button content and borders, as well as the layout of the control (e.g. setting the position of the +/- buttons). It also supports defining and using themes with it.

New Control: Button

In the R1 release we ship our button, which provides a richer experience than the default one. The Button component enables you to control border thickness and location as well as add an image as its background. You can also control the border radius or use an icon to achieve come cool scenarios. Finally, it is fully themable with our theming mechanism. You can read more on this in this article.

New Control: Entry

Finally, we bring you an entry component that features control over the background, text color, font size/location and keyboard used, plus the ability to control its border and its corner radius. Of course, it also supports our Theming mechanism. My colleague, Yana, wrote a blog post that goes over the entry control in more detail.

Your Feedback is Welcome

From a developer to a developer – I would really appreciate if you take it out for a spin and let me know your thoughts. If you are an existing Telerik customer with an active license, go ahead and download the latest bits from your account for free. Or, if you are just giving us another look, please get the latest version – remember all our trials are fully functional and fully supported. We look forward for your feedback.

All of these now can be seen in our new Demo app! And if you like it we made it easily to reuse any part of the code as we shared the source to GitHub.

Try it Out and Learn More at the Webinar

If you are new to our tools or have only tried some, make sure you download the trial and take them for a spin. You can either download just the Telerik UI for Xamarin tools or download a trial of our entire set of .NET and JavaScript tools with the DevCraft bundle.

You can also get in the loop of all the things that we shipped in the Telerik R1 2018 Release by watching the webinar, where our developer experts and product managers will show you all the latest features and demos across all products.

Watch Webinar