Dear all,

Telerik is very excited to announce the first beta of the upcoming RadControls Q1 2007 suite for Windows forms. The beta is dedicated to RadGridView, RadTreeView and RadChart for Winforms - three brand new controls which will be released on April 23rd.

Telerik RadControls for WinForms is a revolutionary set of controls for professional application design and development, offering superior performance and flexibility. Built on an unique architecture, the suite allows you to create interactive Vista-style interfaces which are impossible to achieve with today's Windows Forms tools.

You can download the beta from the following direct download link.

We will kindly ask you to use the official beta forum to send us your thoughts. Your feedback and support will help us fix any remaining issues that are not listed at the end of this post.

The most active participants will be awarded up to 10,000 Telerik points (worth $100 in Telerik products) once the beta is over.

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!


Yours,
The Telerik Winforms team

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WHAT'S IN THE BETA

• 3 new key products - RadGridView, RadTreeView, RadChart
• 1 new integration example - Vista File Explorer
• Completely rewritten and enhanced Shape Editor

PRODUCT FEATURES

RadGridView is a new powerful component from Telerik developed on top of the innovative Telerik Presentation Framework (TPF), which allows for unprecedented combination of performance, extensibility, customizability, and ease of use. Key features:

• Column resizing, reordering, autosizing
• Grouping
• Filtering
• DataBinding to business objects, nullable objects and properties of sub-objects
• Outlook style grouping for flat and hierarchical grids
• Conditional Formatting
• Easily customizable skinning mechanism (by setting a single Skin property)
• Keyboard support
• Automatic, Multi-Column, and Custom Sorting
• Area and Multi-Row Selection (planned for the official release)
• Various Column Types
• Multilevel hierarchy expand/collapse is planned to be released shortly after the official release

RadTreeView facilitates the display, management, and navigation of hierarchical data structures and is the perfect replacement of the standard treeview component for Winforms. Key features:

• Node image support (left, state, select)
• Context menu with customization and skinning capabilities
• Drag 'n' drop node support with visual indication
• Skins/themes support
• Multiselect support
• Full VS2005 design time support
• Node path
• Node checkbox support (checked, unchecked, undefined)
• Node tags
• Expand/collapse all nodes, control over initial node state (expanded/collapsed), expand/collapse by level, expand/collapse path
• HotTracking
• Delayed Loading
• Incremental Search
• In-Place Editing and keyboard navigation
• Load/save treeview nodes from/to XML (planned for the official release)
• Background image support (planned for the official release)

RadChart is a business-oriented charting component with a focus on development productivity and ease-of-use. Key features:

• Chart wizard (planned for the official release)
• Intelligent automatic data binding
• One column data grouping into a set of series
• Real data preview for any Data Source Control
• X Axis data binding
• Real-time preview of any change made from wizard and full changes rollback
• The possibility to set almost all chart features from the wizard
• Full VS 2005 IDE support
• Auto format styles and color palettes
• Default series type

KNOWN ISSUES IN THE BETA

• GridView's and TreeView's visual appearance will be polished further for the official release

RadGridView

• GridView's "Preview" view in VSB displays some styles incorrectly in certain cases
• Column Types example: exception when grouping by Image column: At least one object must implement IComparable.
• Resizing columns bug: the application hangs when one resizes the columns until a horizontal scroll appears, scrolls to the end and tries to resize any column.
• Sorting problem - sort a column, edit the text in any cell and sort again -> doesn't sort correctly against new cell text.
• Edit text in a cell doesn't work properly - doesn't persist the text after second change
• Data Binding example - errors when selecting either ArrayList, List of custom objects, Sub-objects and trying to group.
• Editing properties with the custom design time editor does not invalidate the form and it does not indicate the change. The user must save explicitly the form - nothing will be automatically serialized in the InitializeComponents().
• Property IsPinned in grid builder doesn't work properly.

RadTreeView

• TreeView Press Home/End doesn't scroll to first/last node
• Tab Appearance in treeview builder doesn'tt work properly.

Vista File Explorer example

• Vista Explorer fails when grouping is used and the current view is changed (eg.: Group by file Attribute, then go to My Computer)
• Vista File Explorer -> expand My computer -> the grid shows Desktop items.
• Vista File Explorer - the grid shows all columns when navigating between folders and column chooser has some columns. E.g. - choose Desktop and drag some columns in column chooser; click My Documents -> the grid shows all columns.

ENJOY!