A word on backward compatibility

[Raj]

I would just like to say that I'm a big fan of your controls and support. As a Silverlight control vendor you are far ahead of most everyone else out there. However, it seems everytime I upgrade (most recently to Q3 2009), it is not as straightforward as it could (and should) be. During my latest upgrade I found that my app will not compile because the menu item event handlers now used RadRoutedEventArgs instead of RoutedEventsArgs. Ok, not too bad, but I had to touch several modules to get this resolved. When I finally got the app to compile and run, all of my treeviews were blank - no trees, no nodes... not even errors. The trees were just empty.

After several hours of isolating and simplifying my project, it eventually came to light that my custom control template was now incompatible. It seems that something was introduced in Q3 2009 that did not like my previously working template. So now I have to extract the new control template and customize it to get the desired effect. This is easier than trying to figure out what broke. 

Is there any way that this could have been avoided? Or, at a minimum, could there have been a readme file that listed breaking changes? I understand that testing backward compatibility is not a simple task but you can save your developer community countless hours if some additional effort is invested in this area. 

Thanks,

Raj

[Miroslav]

Hello Raj,

Thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately the ControlTemplate had to be changed because of the newly added virtualization. ScrollViewers require their immediate content to be an element that implements IScrollInfo so that they will transfer viewport and scrolling information to it.

This change was vaguely mentioned in the release history:

http://www.telerik.com/products/silverlight/whats-new/release-history/q3-2009-version-2009-3-1103-1285738400.aspx

as "The ControlTemplate for the TreeView has changed. The InBetweenDragCue element is now placed in a Grid right after the ScrollViewer. The only content of the ScrollViewer now is the ItemsPresenter"

I agree that we could have conveyed this in a clearer and more transparent way.

An article that tracks any issues with changes between the releases for the TreeView has been updated:

http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/silverlight/treeview/treeview-q3-changes.aspx

There is a similar article for breaking changes  in the TabControl as well:

http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/silverlight/tabcontrol/tabcontrol-2009-q2-to-2009-q3-changes.aspx

I am sorry to hear the upgrade has not been quick and transparent for you. If you encounter any issues with upgrading, please do contact us. We are willing to help you as  much as we can so that no time will be wasted with upgrading.

Best wishes,
Miroslav
the Telerik team

Instantly find answers to your questions on the new Telerik Support Portal.
Watch a video on how to optimize your support resource searches and check out more tips on the blogs.