Wednesday, December 13, 2006

first Q4 beta: calendar 2.0

Telerik finally got a Q4 2006 beta out the door today with the delivery of calendar 2.0. As predicted back in November, calendar 2.0's major enhancement is the addition of a new time picker. The time picker, like the date picker, allows users to click a button and and select a time from a table of available times. Developers have complete control over the time table template, time selection interval, and time format, which should make the control flexible enough for many different implementations. Combined with the existing date picker, telerik has delivered a rudimentary scheduling control that lays a foundation they will be able to expand upon in future releases.

There are some other notable changes in calendar 2.0 that all upgrading developers should know. First and foremost, calendar 2.0 is not backwards compatible with previous calendar versions. Telerik has changed the entire skinning mechanism of calendar (eliminating the VisualSettings properties) so that calendar now uses the standard telerik skinning process. The benefit of this change is that multiple calendars on the same page can use different skins, a feat previously unachievable. Telerik has also removed the "Mode" (client, server, ajax) settings for calendar. By default, calendar will operate entirely client-side and will only operate server-side if AutoPostBack is enabled. Calendar's internal AJAX mechanism has also been removed requiring all future calendar AJAX request use r.a.d.ajax integration.

You can play with the new beta on the telerik website or you can read the (hidden) help documentation for calendar 2.0 here. All in all this looks like a solid improvement for the calendar control and any developer waiting for telerik to add time picking features should be happy with this release. So far Q4 is looking good!

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