Q1 WinForms Preview this Thursday, New Visual Style Builder

This week’s weekly webinar is special. It will deliver one of your first “sneak peeks” at some of the new functionality shipping in the rapidly approaching Q1 2010 release (scheduled for mid-March). The Thursday Weekly Webinar will provide a complete overview of a brand new tool shipping with the RadControls for WinForms in Q1: the new Visual Style Builder for WinForms.

The new Visual Style Builder is a completely new tool, not a minor upgrade of the old VSB for WinForms. It dramatically simplifies the process of creating custom themes for the RadControls for WinForms, and in so doing unlocks more of the power built-in to the Telerik Presentation Framework. I’m not often a WinForms developer, but when I saw the new VSB, my first reaction was that we had built Blend for WinForms. It’s impressive.

Don’t miss your first chance to see it in action! The webinar happens this Thursday, February 25th at 11:00 AM Eastern (full timezone conversions). Register now to save your seat and get a link to join the live event. More Q1 news and previews coming soon!

New Q2 WinForms videos on Telerik TV

Just because the "official" Q2 2009 Release Week is behind us does not mean that the new resources for the Q2 bits will not keep flowing. For example, today we released four new videos to Telerik TV that will help jumpstart your work with the RadControls for WinForms Q2 2009 release. Specifically, the videos help you get started with the new RadDock for WinForms and some of the new features in RadScheduler for WinForms. You can catch the "Getting Started with RadDock" video embedded in this post, and then catch all of the Q2 WinForms videos (released so far) on Telerik TV in full, high-quality resolution: Getting Started with RadDock for WinForms Saving and Loading RadDock for WinForms Layouts Codeless Data Binding with RadScheduler for WinForms Adding Custom Fields to RadScheduler for WinForms Appointments Validation with RadGridView for WinForms

Sitefinity 3.6 Beta, WinForms SP2 released

I don't usually "bundle" news items in to a single post, but since it's Friday and I have a couple of releases to announce, I'll make an exception.

First, early this week Telerik released the second service pack for the Q3 2008 RadControls for WinForms. This SP addresses a number of issues across the entire suite, but you can find some highlights in WinForms Evangelist John Kellar's blog post. If you're using the RadGridView for WinForms, this release does a lot to improve the memory management and resource footprint of that control, so it's probably worth your time to download the latest bits. Full release notes, of course, are available online.

Second, today Telerik released the Sitefinity 3.6 Beta. Sitefinity 3.6 is the next "major" release of Silverlight and it's packing a lot of new and improved functionality. The Sitefinity Team and Sitefinity Evangelist Gabe Sumner have both blogged about the new features, so I encourage you to follow those blogs if you're a Sitefinity developer. For those not willing to follow the links, here are some of my favorite improvements in SF 3.6:

• All built-in templates are now Embedded Resources (making it much simpler to customize SF control templates and -significantly- reducing the SF file count)
• New, simplified custom module architecture (backwards compatible)
• Latest versions of both RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight
• Support for hierarchal categories (great when tagging related content)
• "Unbreakable" dynamic links

Even though this release is only a "minor" version tick, it's got enough improvements to warrant major version status. Sitefinity continues to be one of the easiest "CMS" (or, from the developer perspective, "development platforms") for ASP.NET developers to learn and extend since it does not "break" (or modify) ASP.NET the way many other CMS systems do. If you haven't checked it out yet, grab a free copy of the community edition (which you can use for commercial projects) and have fun!

RadGridView for WinForms gets significant performance boost, beta

For those of you developing WinForms applications, this announcement should be great news! On Friday, the Telerik WinForms team released the long awaited (and slightly delayed) RadGridView Q1 2008 beta. This beta is your first chance to start experimenting with the completely revamped GridView control while you wait for the final version to ship in April with the official Q1 release. For the last 3 or 4 months, the WinForms Team has been working almost exclusively on re-engineering RadGridView with one "simple" goal: deliver the best looking and best performing grid for WinForms.

Their months of hard work have paid-off.

In the beta bits released this Friday, you'll discover a RadGridView that is capable of delivering the same rich, WPF-like UI the original Telerik Grid produced without sacrificing performance. In fact, it now delivers that rich UI while beating the performance of almost all other grid products for WinForms. For instance, here are some of the new performance metrics for RadGridView:

• Average time to load 300,000 records: 340 ms
• Average time to group 300,000 records: 100 ms
• Refresh speed improvement over old grid: 150 times faster!
  

These numbers are the outcome of the painstaking work conducted by the WinForms Team to build a tool that delivers uncompromising performance, and I think you have to agree they've achieved some incredible results. Try the new GridView for yourself and put these numbers to the test. I certainly don't expect you to take impressive stats like this at face value, so grab the bits, give them a try, and then talk about your experience in our RadGridView beta forum.

On a final note, remember that this is a beta. We have a little time to go before our Q1 release, so your feedback is critical to help crush any remaining bugs. We hope you like what you see so far, though, and are as excited as we are to reach this milestone!

RadControls for WinForms SP1 finally available

This news is a little old, but for those that haven't seen the announcement, the first service pack for the RadControls for WinForms Q3 2007 is now available. This service pack is a little late by SP1 delivery standards (the ASP.NET SP1 beat WinForms by about 3 weeks), but the results are definitely worth the wait. The WinForms team has been feverishly working on improving the performance of all WinForms controls with the goal of making them the most performant and most visually appealing WinForms controls available. With this SP1 release, the RadControls get a lot closer to that goal.

In particular, the RadCombobox and RadListBox have been completely refactored for speed. And the results are pretty telling. With the new UI virtualization in place, a RadCombobox can load 5,000 items in about half a second. Without this support, the Combobox takes close to 15 seconds to perform the same action. If you download the new SP1 Demo Application, there is a great demo in the Combobox section that lets you run these tests yourself to see the difference.

Also new in SP1 is a brand new common theme for all controls called "Desert" (pictured in this post). The theme introduces earthy colors to the controls, drawing largely from an orangish color pallete. If you've been looking for a new skin for your application, feel free to give this one a spin. Otherwise, grab the SP1 bits from your Client.net accounts (as usual), browse the full release notes, and have fun with the improvements!

WinForms Q3 beta ready for download

As we rapidly approach Q3, the WinForms team has stepped-up to the plate with a public beta of the RadControls for WinForms Q3 2007. The Q3 release for WinForms is packed with new controls and performance improvements, some of which we've talked about before. There are seven new controls in Q3 for WinForms, including:

• RadMaskedEditBox
• RadRotator
• RadStatusStrip
• RadSpinEditor
• RadColorSelector
• RadRadioButton
• RadDateTimePicker

In addition to all of the new controls, the entire Telerik Presentation Framework has been tweaked to run faster than ever. All controls are now more responsive thanks to faster screen painting and refreshing.

The only major control that won't get its "major" update in Q3 is RadGridView. RadGridView has been totally rewritten and the new major version is significantly better than our current GridView and better than most other WinForms grids out there (performance-wise). It will be released shortly after Q3, but we'll be publishing many more details about how that will work soon. For now, just note that the improvements in the Q3 version of GridView are just the tip of the iceburg that is to follow in January.

The documentation is also getting a big boost in Q3, so check that out too if you've found the docs to be lacking in the past. All in all, there are a lot of good things going on in Q3 for WinForms developers, so get started today by downloading the beta and telling us what you think about all of the improvements.

Feedback wanted, WinForms new and improved documentation

It is not often that I call on you to volunteer to be editors, but the opportunity has presented itself again. This time it is for the new and vastly improved RadControls for WinForms documentation. Over the past several months, Telerik and it's incredible documentation partner, Falafel, have been diligently pounding away at filling-out and improving the documentation for all RadControls for WinForms. Our early surveys found that documentation was a weak point for WinForms, so we've been working very hard to fix the problem. And now we can happily report that we think we've done a good job.

But what do you think? That's what we really want to know. If you're a WinForms developer (and according to my local survey, about 20% of you are), take a look at the new documentation and tell us what you think in the official documentation feedback forums. Even if you're not a WinForms developer, take a look at the documentation and let us know how you think it compares to other documentation you've used. A simple "pretty impressive" or "you really need more about X" is all we need to know. So put on your editor hat and give it to us straight!

RadCarousel for WinForms coming, preview available now

Doesn't it seem like every "cool" WPF demo application you see these days features some kind of flashy carousel UI? You know the type: you click on a button and items spin past you, growing and shrinking from background to foreground along a circular path. Have you ever wished you could include that in your apps today without making the whole jump to WPF? Now you can.

Telerik has just announced the carousel control included in the Q2 2007 WinForms demos will become an official, full-featured control in the Q1 2008 release. But you don't even have to wait 'til Q1 to get your flashy WinForms UI on. The complete code for the control has been posted in the Telerik Code Library, available for your immediate download. Clearly, this code does not represent the final version of the control that will be released in Q1, but it's enough to get you started with the carousel in your apps.

Count this as just a small sign of things to come as Telerik builds on the innovative "Telerik Presentation Framework" underpinning all RadControls for WinForms. I'll share some more about what's coming for WinForms in Q3 soon!

Microsoft: WinForms here to stay...for now

As promised, here is the shocking news that is starting to come to light. When Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 start shipping in a few weeks, Microsoft won't be recommending that companies use WPF to build applications. No, they'll be recommending that people building new LoB (Line of Business) apps (a.k.a. business apps) use the tried and true WinForms technology to get the job done. WPF won't be explicitly discouraged, per se. Instead WPF will be encouraged as the platform for "rich experience apps" and WinForms will get the nod for everything else...from Microsoft.

If that doesn't surprise you, then you've probably missed what seems like at least a year's worth of "WinForms is dead" "don't start any new development in WinForms" discussion in the industry. It will be very interesting to see how this increasingly public position from Microsoft will affect the adoption rate of WPF in business development and how the component industry will react. Microsoft claims this is not a new position and consistent with the messages they've been sending, and based on the details in the WPF paper they promoted technically they're right. In fact, for many months Microsoft has been saying "use the best technology and integrate" (meaning build with WinForms and integrate WPF), it just seems that message is finally starting to sink in.

So what does this news mean? Does it mean the tools in Visual Studio 2008 aren't really ready for full scale WPF development? Does it mean WPF itself (or at least with its current out of the box tools) is not ready for business development? I'll let you draw your own conclusions on those points, but it definitely does mean that WinForms development is here to stay for at least another couple of years. Sound off and let me know what you think of this news in the comments.

WinForms controls on dnrTV

Here's another hot news item that I didn't deliver to you on time. A little more than a week ago I sat down (virtually, of course) with .NET celeb Carl Franklin to film a new episode of dnrTV all about Telerik's RadControls for WinForms. The episode was released late on October 12th, but it is still on the homepage of dnrTV at the time of this writing.

What is dnrTV? For those that have never seen it, dnrTV delivers Camtasia captured screen casts of conversations that Carl has with a vast array of guests from the .NET world. The WinForms episode that we "filmed" comes in a series of dnrTV episodes focusing on various .NET products. But unlike unfettered internally produced web casts on .NET products, dnrTV episodes benefit from the candid and insightful questions that Carl delivers to guests- often the questions you wish you could ask while watching a web cast.

Either way, it was fun to shoot and it is a great way to learn about what Telerik is doing in the WinForms space if you still have yet to check it out. And without giving too much away, I have some pretty big news regarding WinForms learned at VSIP that I'm going to try to share later this week. I guarantee it will surprise you. Until then, check out the dnrTV episode and look for more content like this in the future.

WinForms Q2 2007 beta released

Today is a busy day for announcements. Hot on the heals of the official release of RadControls for Silverlight 1.0, Telerik is pleased to present the beta of the RadControls for WinForms Q2 2007. Out almost 3 weeks ahead of the official September 17th release, this beta should allow plenty of time for you to submit your feedback and suggestions for improvement.

As was the case with the WinForms SP2 release a couple of months ago, Q2 2007 will focus mainly on improving the performance of the RadControls. Since their introduction, performance has been the number one issue with WinForms developers and thus our number one priority. Our devs have worked hard on improving that situation and I think you'll be very pleased with what you find in Q2.

Even though performance was the main focus of Q2, there are some new controls for you to play with. RadChart for WinForms received a major update in this release and a brand new control- RadCalendar- has been added to the suite. RadCalendar delivers the same rich "WPF-like" visuals that you've come to expect from Telerik's WinForm controls and an API that is similar to the ASP.NET version. If you're using the rigid standard WinForms calendar control, you definitely need to check out RadCalendar for WinForms.

Help us make Q2 a great release by downloading the beta today and letting us know what you think.

Telerik WinForms CAB Enabling Kit beta released

For any developers in the Telerik community that develop WinForms applications using the Composite UI Application Block, this is some very exciting news. Today we announced and released the beta of our new RadControls for WinForms CAB Enabling Kit. This new kit provides seamless integration of the RadControls in CAB-based smart client applications and makes the process of using Telerik's WinForms controls with the CAB among the best in the industry.

The new CAB Enabling Kit is going to be actively supported and updated by Telerik, earning status as a separate Telerik product. Obviously, it will be freely available to all WinForms subscription holders. Before the official release in Q2, the Kit's WPF Woodgrove Finance-like demo will receive some need fit-and-finish, but other than that it is ready for you to start downloading and testing. We look forward to supporting CAB developers in the future and to enhancing the Kit to make it the best development experience available for developing rich CAB-based applications.

Download the CAB Kit beta today and then give us your feedback in the forums. The most active beta testers have the opportunity to earn up to 5,000 Telerik points!

r.a.d.controls for WinForms not free after February

When telerik first introduced the r.a.d.controls for WinForms last year, I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that my existing r.a.d.controls for ASP.NET Developer Licenses included the WinForms controls for "free". Overnight my component toolbox doubled in size and I suddenly had some amazing "Office 12 esque" controls to spruce up my WinForms applications. But how could telerik afford to give me so many controls for less than a $1000 when other vendors are selling ASP.NET and WinForms component libraries for over $1200 each?!

The honeymoon for the WinForms controls ends in March. At that time the WinForms and ASP.NET controls will be separately licensed and priced as separate packages. It is unlikely that this change will have a negative affect on too many developers since we usually tend to specialize in Windows or Web development (if you haven't gathered from the blog by now, I lean towards the Web). Controls for the environment we don't live in are probably collecting dust in our toolboxes anyway.

If you are an ambidextrous programmer and you do use both r.a.d.controls for ASP.NET and WinForms, make sure you prepare for a little price increase in March if you want to get the 2007 r.a.d.control updates. And trust me, you want the 2007 updates...