Thursday, April 26, 2007

RadControls for Silverlight demos live

In anticipation of the upcoming Mix'07 conference in Las Vegas, Telerik has decided to reveal to the world some early previews of the new RadControls for Silverlight. Telerik has been quietly working on WPF/e Silverlight controls since the very first bits were released from Microsoft and today's demos represent the early results of that work.

One of the challenges developers face when working with Silverlight is that no concept of "controls" exists in the current framework. Even the most basic UI components must be hand crafted to use Silverlight in its current state. To solve that problem and make developers lives easier, Telerik has developed a component framework for Silverlight and delivered several "building block" controls (and a couple "composite" controls):

  • Button
  • Image
  • Media
  • Label
  • CustomElement
  • StringLayoutPanel
  • Cube
These controls still represent the infant stages of Telerik's Silverlight offering, but they do establish Telerik as the leading Silverlight component vendor. Check out the live demos (complete with "obligatory" spinning cubes) and lead developer Hristo Kosev's recent blog post for more details about these new controls.

2 comments:

creedthoughts said...

Those examples are a bit disappointing. None of them are really practical interfaces that I would publish for anyone to use. I would prefer a powerful mix of features similar to the YouTube interface showing a sample video and a playlist manager coordinated using a bit of AJAX, etc.

Todd Anglin said...

Offwhite-

These are definitely early and simple Silverlight examples. There are already plans to introduce some more complex examples (and controls) in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

And for the record, I agree that a cube interface is not very practical (usability speaking). What it demonstrates, though, are the capabilities Silverlight exposes on which Telerik controls can be built. Watch for more "practical" controls soon.

Thanks for the feedback!
Todd