WinForms R3 2021 Is Here: New Task Board, Filter View and Hierarchy Support in Navigation View

The R3 2021 release brings two brand new controls as well as the highly requested support for hierarchy in the Navigation View. The entire suite also comes with .NET 6.0 and Visual Studio 2022 Preview support. We’ve also worked hard to pack the release with more than 80 other improvements.

Task Board

Let me first ask you a question: Task Board or Kanban—what should we call it? We’ve decided to go for RadTaskBoard. Still, if you prefer, you can use Kanban—it’s up to you. The important thing is that no matter what we call it, the control is here, and it will make it easy for your end users to track their tasks in a simple, agile-style manner.

Indeed, a Kanban-like control is an important addition to the suite. It comes with many features, like columns, tasks, users, tags, drag and drop, selection, accent settings, touch support, etc. With the Task Board control, you can give freedom to your end users and bring task management to the next level. It’s a great tool for visualizing task progress, workflow and team management. I bet your end users will love it.

Filter View

Now let’s filter some data. The easiest way to do it is to use the RadFilterView control. You are probably familiar with the filtering UI the various retailers provide while shopping online. Well, now a similar control comes to the Telerik UI for WinForms suite. The RadFilterView provides a user-friendly UI for building filter descriptors.

The control has an engine responsible for going through all the data and, based on the records, it builds appropriate categories and editors. This makes it easy for you to provide your end users with beautiful and easy-to-follow UI for filtering large amounts of data.

The control can bind to a data source and filter it independently. Alternatively, it can be integrated with another data-aware Telerik control. For example, you can present a large amount of data inside RadGridView and put a RadFilterView next to it. Then, your end users can do all the filtering using the Filter View. The control also comes with customizable editors and full UI localization.

Hierarchy in the Navigation View

The Navigation View inside RadPageView can now build a hierarchy. This was a highly requested feature, and I will admit it was indeed dearly missed. Now the RadPageViewPage type exposes the SubPages collection where you can add the pages that you want to appear as hierarchical children. This mode supports drag and drop, infinite nesting, as well as comes with various settings controlling the visual appearance.

Other Goodies

Besides the top highlights discussed so far, we have other cool improvements to mention. We are committed to integrating the suite with the latest .NET and Visual Studio, so we worked on enabling .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022. Windows 11 is also supported, so you can use its new awesome rounded geometry with the RadForms. We also created a brand-new example in our demo app and worked relentlessly on addressing customer feedback—more than 80 improvements.

.NET 6.0

We’ve built our controls against all the preview versions of .NET 6, and we can confirm that we are fully compatible. The easiest way to use the controls in .NET 6 projects is to install our NuGet packages. .NET 6 has many general improvements, so if you want to target this SDK, Telerik UI for WinForms has you covered.

Visual Studio 2022

If you are adventurous enough, you can also try Visual Studio 2022. This version is still in preview, but it might be worth it to see how it will run for you—supposedly it should outperform VS2019. The biggest gain is that the devenv.exe process is 64 bits, and the application should better handle large solutions. My initial impressions confirm this statement. On the Telerik side, we’ve updated our installer and VSIX extensions so that they are fully compatible with this preview version.

Windows 11

The latest and greatest Windows will soon be available, so we wanted to see how our controls would fit there. Windows 11 comes with built-in support for rounded corners, and they can be easily enabled for the RadForms.

Demo Application

We’re offering a new example inside the RadPanorama control. We wanted to create a demo showing how the tiles inside the panorama control can be customized. The custom tiles incorporate additional elements to form a header, middle part and footer. A similar approach can be followed to do other customizations.

WinForms Converter

We’ve had the WinForms converter for a couple of years already. It magically converts the Microsoft controls to Telerik ones. If you have a standard WinForms project and you want to modernize it, go ahead and test it: WinForms Converter.

This tool is part of an extension inside Visual Studio, and because of a breaking change inside the Roslyn compiler platform, the tool did not work with the latest Visual Studio versions. I am very happy that we’ve managed to fix this issue, and now the converter is compatible with the latest official Visual Studio.

A Ton of Other Improvements

As I said somewhere above, we’ve managed to address more than 80 items logged on our Feedback Portal. We are committed to addressing customer feedback, fixing the issues and implementing the features important for you.

Try it Out

Make sure to download and try the latest version of Telerik UI for WinForms to explore all the new features and themes.

Download Telerik UI for WinForms

We’d love to hear how this all works for you, so please let us know your thoughts by visiting our Feedback Portal or by leaving a comment below.