The latest release of Telerik UI for WinForms is here, with new tools to help upgrade your Forms, plus new controls, styles and more.

With this blog post I am happy to announce the R2 2016 release of Telerik UI for WinForms, which is already available for download. As usual for a major release, we continued investing in increasing our product quality and adding new very exciting additions to the suite. Let’s dive in.

Conversion Tool (CTP)

As you all know, the Telerik UI for WinForms suite aims to help developers build beautiful, modern, feature rich applications faster than ever—allowing you to deliver your products in a shorter timeframe and reduce production costs. In our days, however, there are also plenty of old school Windows Forms applications created with the standard controls, and these applications are getting harder and harder to maintain and develop. At the same time, customers always need more and more.

One way to address such need is to convert the existing application (using the standard Windows Forms controls) to a reliable third party library, like Telerik UI for WinForms, so you can further extend the functionality of the application and give it a modern look. However, depending on the application(s) size and number of projects, this might be a very time consuming (and expensive) project.

Telerik UI for WinForms is here to help. I am very excited to share that the R2 2016 release marks a major milestone in our product with its newest groundbreaking addition—a Conversion Tool which helps convert applications using standard Windows Forms controls to their Telerik UI for WinForms counterparts.

The left image shows a Form with standard controls, right image shows the result of the conversion

This tool has one purpose—to save you as much time and effort as possible, so you can convert your applications much faster and more easily. In its first version (currently released as CTP), the tool will convert 19 of the standard controls with over 10 more planned in near future.

How Does it Work?

Once Telerik UI for WinForms R2 2016 is installed on a machine with Visual Studio 2015 Update 2*, you can open up your application solution (.sln) and use the new menu option available in the Telerik Menu in Visual Studio to start the simple conversion wizard. The latter allows you to pick which of the currently supported standard controls you would like to convert to their Telerik UI for WinForms counterparts, and then initiate the process.

Once the Convert button is clicked, the tool will add the Telerik UI for WinForms references to the available projects in your solution and will scan them for the selected controls to convert. Where such controls are found they will be converted to their counterparts. Due to the different APIs some build errors might occur which have to be reviewed manually. Once done, you are presented with a list and a log of all files being changed, so you can review every change and make sure your app works as expected.

*The tool is built on top of the Roslyn compiler platform which forces some minimum requirements:

• .NET 4.6.1 as a minimum (required by Roslyn)
• Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 (the first VS version that comes with .NET 4.6.1)

I welcome you to try this tool with your existing applications. We really appreciate your feedback on it, as it will help us better shape the Converter Tool roadmap.

New Control—RadCardView

Another new addition to the suite is the brand new RadCardView control, whose purpose is to present data in a card format (think of the contact cards in Outlook). It also provides editors to edit the data fields. The control is based on RadListView, which provides some of its existing functionalities like sorting, grouping, filtering, data binding and unbound mode right out of the box. Of course, fine grain customization is available so you can style your cards and their layout the way you like.

Each card holds an element based on RadLayoutControl, which allows both design time and runtime customization of the card template. This provides easy card setup at design time and also allows the end-users to rearrange the cards layout at runtime according to their preferences. Furthermore, using the layout control abilities delivers the variety of items it supports to better shape your cards—control items, labels, separators, group items and tabbed groups.

RadCardView supports both vertical and horizontal flow layout for its cards.

RadWaitingBar Gets New Styles

A popular request we had is to add a circular waiting indicator similar to the one in Windows 8 and above. When discussing this request we came to the conclusion that just one indicator is not enough, so we decided to add seven new cool waiting indicators to the control, so you now have 10 predefined styles to choose from.

Just like the existing indicators, the new ones are highly, and I mean highly, customizable in a variety of ways. You can add/remove additional elements, change colors, shapes and so much more. In addition, when RadWaitingBar is added to the form you will be presented with a convenient gallery to pick the indicator you like the most and to fine tune it, should you decide to.

And that’s not all. We have added a really neat feature to RadWaitingBar, which allows you to associate it with a particular control. When its StartWaiting method is called, the waiting bar will be shown at the center of the associated control.

RadVirtualGrid Is Now Official

RadVirtualGrid was released back in R1 2016 as a beta. It was packed with new features in the Service Pack and now it is further polished for its official release. I hope you enjoy our new component and feel free to send over any feedback you have about it.

New SpreadStreamProcessing Library

This new library is delivered as new assembly (Telerik.Documents.SpreadsheetStreaming.dll), and its purpose to allow the creation of big spreadsheet documents and to export them to the most common file formats (XLSX and CSV) with great performance and minimal resources. To achieve its outstanding performance and low memory footprint, the library directly writes the necessary content in a stream without creating an object model for the whole document.

Modern Visual Studio Extensions

In this release we also introduced new design for our visual studio extensions, which aims to make your getting started experience even better.

RadRichTextBox Will Be Removed

It has been a year and a half since we have marked RadRichTextBox as obsolete, and I would like to once again invite you to switch to the improved editor control—RadRichTextEditor. RadRichTextBox will be removed from our code base soon.

Hurry up and give our latest bits a try (for new users you can download a trial). As always your feedback can be submitted in our Feedback portal.

The R2 2016 release of Telerik Reporting is live. We deliver top requested features like interactive sorting, improved page breaks and more.

The R2 2016 release of Telerik Reporting is here. For this release we have delivered the top requested features in our feedback portal.

Interactive Sorting

In R2 2016 we now support interactive sorting action for all data items and groups. This means that all of the items/groups that currently support static sorting now support interactive sorting action. This includes table, crosstab, graph, map, choropleth, list, report and their groups. The sorting action is available in interactive mode for all viewers (HTML5, MVC, Web Forms [modern and legacy], Silverlight, WPF and Windows Forms) and in the report designers' previews.

Report Viewers Can Display Remote Reports

The WPF and WinForms Report Viewers can now consume reports from Telerik Report Server and Telerik Reporting REST service.

In the previous release, we integrated the HTML5 Report Viewers with Telerik Report Server. Now we continue our efforts and have enabled the Telerik Reporting desktop report viewers (WPF and Windows Form) to consume reports rendered in Telerik Report Server or Telerik REST Service. As a result, you can feed your WPF or WinForms app with reports stored, rendered, and cached remotely.

This will enable you to update each report remotely without the end user having to upgrade the already installed application. Additionally, you can use all of the Report Server caching capabilities and schedule complex reports for pre-rendering. Thus, when requested the report will be delivered without any delay.

Automatic Page Breaks in Nested Tables

This is another highly requested feature. Generally Telerik Reporting has always supported nesting data items, even if they use different data sources. Now we have improved our vertical and horizontal paging, and when building nested tables, the row/column of the parent table will automatically insert page breaks when the nested table content doesn’t physically fit into the current page. This way you can nest any number of tables, crosstabs and lists without worrying about unwanted blank space.

We hope you enjoy our latest upgrades. Feel free to grab a free trial today, and we look forward to hearing your feedback through our portal or in the comments below.

The Telerik Report Server R2 2016 release is now here. We deliver top requested features like Data Alerts and improved integration with report viewers.

The R2 2016 release of Telerik Report Server has landed. In this release we bring you the top requested features by the community.

Data Alerts

In the latest release we now support data alerts. Data alerts are a data driven alerting solution which allows you to be informed about report data that is important and relevant to your interests, and at the right time. Data alerts save you time, keeping you from going through numerous reports to find relevant information. With data alerts the important information comes to you.

The data alert runs at a scheduled time and checks whether specific data conditions are satisfied. If the data conditions are satisfied, a report document is generated and sent to the alert's subscribers by email. A data alert can be run once or on a recurrent basis.

Report Server Reports in More Report Viewers

Telerik Report Server reports can now be used with the WPF and WinForms Report Viewers.

In the last release, we integrated the HTML5 Report Viewers with Telerik Report Server. Now we continue our efforts and have enabled the Telerik Reporting desktop report viewers (WPF and Windows Form) to consume reports rendered in Telerik Report Server. Thus, you can feed your WPF or WinForms app with reports stored, rendered, and cached remotely.

This will let you update each report remotely on the Report Server without the end user having to upgrade the already installed application. Additionally, you can use all of the Report Server caching capabilities and schedule complex reports for pre-rendering. As a result, when requested the report will be delivered without any delay.

The Telerik team is at NG-Conf 2016. Get the latest Angular news, and take advantage of our giveaway whether you're here with us or at home!

NG-Conf is going on right now in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference brings three full days of Angular glory, including talented speakers, workshops and fun post-conference events. The amazing Telerik team is present at the event, speaking in two different sessions this week:

• Sharing Code Between Web and Native Apps
• Building Native iOS and Android Apps With Angular 2 and NativeScript - Fair Day Workshop

Feel free to stop by the booth!

Whether you're here with us or watching from home, we want to tell you that we've just made awesome prizes available to all!

Fantastic Giveaways

We have some fantastic giveaways for those attending the conference, and we bring the excitement of ngConf 2016 to those viewing online by extending our NG-Conf 2016 giveaways to those watching the Keynote!

Apart from the great prizes, huge Star Wars themed giveaways and our lovely Angular NativeScript T-shirt, we will be giving away 500 licenses of Telerik UI for NativeScript (valued at $199). This giveaway is open to developers both at ngConf and around the world watching the keynote online. 

Here is how to enter to win one of 500 free licenses:

• Be one of the first 500 people to complete this short questionnaire
• The winners will be notified shortly via the email address used to fill out the survey
• Brownie points to those who tweet with the following hashtag: #ngconf

For those of you who are unable to attend the conference live, the ng-conf team will be streaming the whole event online. Head to https://www.ng-conf.org/ starting at 11 am ET for details.

Your top requested features are here in the latest release of Telerik UI for WPF/Silverlight, including new components and a sample application.

I'm excited to announce that the R2 2016 release of UI for WPF/Silverlight is live and ready to be downloaded. For this release we were mainly focused on bringing to life many of the top requested features from our Feedback portal, as well as on delivering two brand new components (RadLayoutControl and RadSpreadStreamProcessing) and a sample application (ERP).

Top New Additions and Improvements

RadGridView—Pinned Rows and Improved ComboBox Column

You can now pin particular rows to the top or bottom of your WPF RadGridView control so that they do not participate in the vertical scrolling. Also we are introducing improved and much faster ComboBoxColumn. All you have to do is set the  IsLightweightModeEnabled property of the column to true.

ERP—New Sample Application

See how the new Green theme, RadTreeView, RadGridView, RadMap and many more controls from the UI for WPF suite can be used for building great and responsive UI.

RadLayoutControl—New WPF Control

The most requested control in our list, RadLayoutControl, is now available. It brings the following features with its CTP version:

• Complex layouts: With RadLayoutControl you can create complex composition that can be easily rearranged and resized according to the available size of the control.
• Runtime layout customization: End users can customize the layout even while the application is running, including rearranging items and hiding and resizing them. More information on the supported manipulations can be found in this help article: Items Manipulation.
• Items Nesting: The control also supports nesting items inside one another which gives you great flexibility and control. It allows for the creation of complex layouts in an easy and intuitive drag and drop manner.
• Layout display modes: The control allows you to define different display modes for the layout items—standard, expander or tabbed.

RadSpreadStreamProcessing—New Document Exporting Library

The new library added to UI for WPF will allow you to create large spreadsheet documents and export them in a spit-second to the most common file formats with great performance and minimal resources.

A reasonable question to ask is: “How is this different than the 'old' RadSpreadProcessing?” The key difference is the absence of a document model. This ensures blazing performance of the export, as the content is written directly to a stream without increasing memory usage; of course, if you need loading and editing documents, or evaluating formulas, the general-purpose RadSpreadProcessing should step up.

A document with a size of 40K can be exported in 1.2 seconds, and you can see below how 160K cells are exported in under 3.5 seconds.

Note: The features below are available with our UI for Silverlight suite too

RadRichTextBox

Beginning in R2 2016, you can arrange the text in a Section into columns.

RadScheduleView

With the new CurrentTimeIndicatorLocation property, the current time indicator now can cross the whole area of the control.

RadDocking

Now you can modify, save and load custom properties of RadDocking’s layout using the ElementLayoutSaving, ElementLoading and CustomElementLoading events of the RadDocking control.

RadPdfViewer

This gains improved memory usage when rendering big images and when scrolling through pages.

RadSpreadsheet

Header and Footer functionality allows you to add rich text content in the page margins when exporting a worksheet to pages. This feature is useful in scenarios like exporting to PDF, printing with RadSpreadsheet control or import/export to XLSX.

RadPivotGrid

Now you have the option to ignore null values when calculating the aggregate result.

Other Key Improvements

GitHub Code Now in Our Documentation

As most of you know we have over 2000+ developer focused examples stored in our GitHub repository. There you may find complex solutions for different scenarios that you wrote to us about. Now you can easily browse them on Developer Focused Example page for every control in our help documentation, find the needed demo and copy the code that you need easily without navigating out of the documentation.

Visual Studio Design Time Improvements

For those of you that struggle with choosing which theme to apply, we introduced an easy to use functionality right at your fingertips in the VS design time that will do the work for you. This feature is available in both Silverlight and WPF suites.

Your Feature Not Mentioned?

The second major release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX for 2016 is here, including a new Ripple effect in the Material theme, Theme Builder enhancements, improved controls and a new Outlook-inspired Visual Studio layout template.

As a Product Owner, I know how important the stability, overall look and performance of the UI components are for you, your managers and of course your clients. That is why we invested a serious amount of time during the last year to not only improve the UI and UX and limit the known bugs, but also to modernize the rendering and to ease the appearance customization.

We've got a lot of enhancements for you as part of R2'16, so let me dive deeper into the highlights.

Appearance Improvements

During the R2 session, we utilized the time to:

• Unify the rendering on the form related controls: inputs, buttons, combos and checkboxes.
• Add the famous Ripple effect to the Material skin to make your apps even more interactive and closer to Google's concept for the Material feeling.
  
• Include the Material skin in the Theme Builder, which will soon allow you to create and customize themes based on the Material theme. We are currently testing the new functionality internally and it will go live in about a week.
• Remove the hard-coded in the skins Font settings (see more here).
• Enhance RadPanelBar’s appearance by making its normal, hover and active states of root items and collapse/expand handlers more consistent.
• Increase the size of the RadEditor toolbar's icons and renovated the Table Wizard dialog.

We also worked on many more changes with the sole purpose of making the appearance of your apps better, modern and pixel perfect. 

New Highly Anticipated Features in the Controls

Upgraded Grid Performance

RadGrid now offers improved resizing performance, improved performance when RadRating is used inside the grid with enabled virtualization, and performance-optimized usage of the client set_value method of RadRating in GridRatingColumn.

For ease of use, we've added a built-in print button too:

Improved Spreadsheet Functionality

You can now populate the spreadsheet through the popular XLSX format on the client via the built-in MS Excel Import functionality. Yet another nice feature is that you can style the spreadsheet with any of the available built-in themes in the suit:
 

Great Table Editing in RadEditor

The end-users are going to enjoy the improved UI for table editing and management, which will enrich their experience in desktop and mobile environment. The table wizard and editing features have been renovated and are easier to use than ever. We've also replaced the old context menus of RadEditor with RadMenu, which is not only more flexible, but also introduces support for sub-menus and easier skinning.
 

New Getting Started Outlook-Inspired Template

The Outlook-inspired template joins the power of some of the most popular controls in the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX suite to create one of the most recognizable applications in the world—Microsoft Outlook. You can easily spot how RadGrid, RadButton, RadInput, RadScheduler and RadCalendar blend seamlessly.

The Visual Studio template can be used as a layout for a quick start of any other business application. The layout template is a light version of the WebMail sample app, built with Telerik ASP.NET AJAX components.


 

Additional Information About R2 2016

Curious to learn more about the release? Follow the links below:

• Release Notes
• Live Demos
• What’s New page
  
  

Got Feedback?

If you have questions or comments regarding the R2'16 release, post them below. I'll be glad to answer them.

You can also post your suggestions or feature requests as well as vote for the existing ones in the AJAX Feedback portal.

The latest release of Kendo UI is here, with brand new upgrades to our HTML editor, Spreadsheet, DataViz and more. We also continue to explore React, Angular 2 and Bootstrap support.

The focus in our second release for this year remained on you, the Kendo UI developer. Kendo UI is all about being a stable, reliable, feature-complete toolkit that enables you to build awesome web apps quickly. To help you be even more productive, we dedicated ourselves harder than ever to improving the core product, implementing more than thirty feature requests and closing more than a hundred bugs. Here is a short list of our top accomplishments.

HTML Editor Features

The Editor widget received long-overdue attention in this release. Some of the most voted features from our UserVoice portal are now implemented.

Markdown Support for the Editor

The simplicity of Markdown and its restrictive nature makes it the default choice for public-facing content creation scenarios, like comment forms. The format is also lighter compared to HTML which makes it easy on your database.

Auto URL Detection

The editor detects words starting with "http://" or "www." and automatically converts them to hyperlinks.

Custom Callbacks for Serializing and Deserializing Content

This allows for customization of the content. Common scenarios for this include obtaining the edited content as markdown or plain text, or stripping certain HTML tags.

A pasteCleanup Option

The pasteCleanup option allows for the pre-processing of the clipboard contents.

Spreadsheet

The most notable features included in this release are hyperlink support for cell contents, multi-line editing and the ability to show/hide the sheet grid lines—a feature useful for print/export scenarios.

You can test the features above in our online demos.

DataViz Features

The chart features a new series type—verticalBoxPlot.

The Box Plot chart is useful for comparing distributions between different sets of numerical data. It depicts numerical data by displaying a data distribution summary with six indicators (lower value, first quartile, median, mean, third quartile, upper value) and outliers for each set of data.

The vertical box plot mode is suitable for mobile devices, especially smartphones, in portrait mode.

The canvas rendering mode now supports events. This enables the interactive features like tooltip and hover—to see it in action, check the pan-zoom demo.

Speaking of canvas, pan and zoom, the canvas rendering also responds to pinch/zoom gestures on mobile devices. You can check this out by opening the demo from above on your mobile device:

The drawing API shape configuration includes a tooltip option which displays a tooltip when the shape is hovered upon.

To see the new Kendo UI pieces in action, register for the DevCraft Release Webinar. Three times are available from May 11-12.   

Preview: Kendo UI for React

Our long term vision for Kendo UI is to continue to be the default UI toolkit of choice in the ever-changing web development landscape. This spring we decided to experiment, allocating a small part of our development resources to exploring the next generation of web app fundamentals—React, Angular 2 and Bootstrap—without disturbing the work on the current Kendo UI offering.

Rearrange Your Concepts—Component ≠ Widget

The React component design however has little in common with the jQuery widget concept (used in Kendo UI today). The same applies to the data flow pattern when compared to the MVVM two-way data-binding concept in Kendo UI, AngularJS 1.* and KnockoutJS. We had to re-think the role and the features of the UI building blocks so that they truly fit the design of the framework.

Before we move into the complex domain of grids, schedulers and gantt charts, we had to get the basics right. We decided to explore how we can ease common development tasks like data entry forms, layout grouping and basic user interaction.

If you are interested in Kendo UI for React, make sure to follow our efforts in the public GitHub repositories. Subscribe for the issues and keep an eye on the releases for the changelog bits. Once we reach a usable state, we publish the repositories’ contents as scoped NPM packages in the NPM Telerik account (the scoped packages are not visible in the NPMJS search results yet. The NPM team is working on this).

The DropDowns, Inputs, Buttons, and Dialog repositories contain the DropDown, ComboBox, Slider, Button, ButtonGroup and Dialog components, with the intent of implementing the rest of the editors present in current Kendo UI suite. The TabStrip, PanelBar and Dialog components are available in the Layout and Dialog repositories. We extracted some of our internal building blocks in their own packages, too—check the Draggable, the Animation, and the Popup.

Most likely, you have already noticed something; unlike Kendo UI and its monolithic distribution, we are trying something new with React—breaking the components into multiple smaller packages. The reason for this is obvious: JavaScript now has a Package Manager. Originally meant for NodeJS, NPM eventually got re-purposed and brought to the client-side by tools like Webpack, SystemJS, and Browserify. React fully embraces the NPM installation and distribution mechanism, and so does Kendo UI.

Another not-so obvious change is that the components are semantically versioned. The semantic versioning release mechanism will be used in place of our current Official release/Service pack/Internal release process, and will allow for a safer dependency management strategy.

Kendo UI for Angular 2 Is In the Works

React and Angular share a lot in common: transpilers (Babel/TypeScript), the component building block concept, the DOM abstraction. The development of the React components allowed us to reuse our research and infrastructure development whenever it was common for the two environments. 

With the first batch of React components out, we will follow up with their Angular 2 equivalents throughout our next release period. The components will follow the same convention as React—you can keep an eye on the kendo-angular repository list; the common component infrastructure is already released.

Preview: Bootstrap 4 Sass Theme

The Sass vs LESS debate has been a hot topic for a while, with LESS being the preferred solution for JavaScript inclined projects that did not want to have a ruby dependency for its build process. With node-sass this is no longer the case—the fact that Bootstrap replaced LESS with Sass in their next major release (v4) says a lot.

That, combined with many of our customers requesting Sass theme support, sparked the idea of creating a Bootstrap 4 based Sass Theme for Kendo UI that will automatically pick the Bootstrap customizations and propagate them to the component looks. Our goal with the theme is to make it compatible with the current Kendo UI Suite and with the React/Bootstrap component offering. You may follow the development and try the demos in the Kendo-Bootstrap GitHub repository.

Quick Links

If you're curious to explore the above and give it a spin, follow these links to the official demos, documentation and release notes.

Got Feedback?

I’ll be glad to hear your input and thoughts about the R2'16 release in the comments section below, as well as suggestions for new functionality, which you can post to our official feedback portal. Don't hesitate to submit your votes for the already existing features to raise their priority.

As part of the latest UI for NativeScript release, Angular 2 is now supported for key NativeScript components.

Angular 2 is a hot topic these days, especially around NG Conf, where you should have noticed the NativeScript presence.

Unbelievable traffic at @telerik@nativescript booth @ #ngconf#happyDevs spin to win! pic.twitter.com/1L9gRaGWIr

— Jen Looper (@jenlooper) May 6, 2016

Among all the other goodies in the newly released NativeScript 2.0, the updated Angular 2 integration backed by Google will allow you to easily develop your native mobile apps and your websites reusing a significant part of your code.

UI for NativeScript is heading in the very same direction. With the latest 1.1.0 release, the ListView and the SideDrawer have Angular 2 support as well. Note that the support is in Beta until Google officially announces Angular 2 on their side.

Wondering how to get started with Angular 2 support more easily? Here are some resources to get you started.

• Documentation—the UI for NativeScript documentation has been enhanced with dedicated Angular 2 articles
• Developer friendly demo app—get your hands on small working examples that help you easily understand the features and API usage

You can also check out our brand new Demo application on iTunes and Google Play. It shows the Chart, SideDrawer ListView controls in action. Soon, we will add demos for the Calendar as well as the Angular 2 version of the app to its GitHub repo.

Just to remind you, ListView and SideDrawer are a part of the freely available UI for NativeScript Free product. You can get them from NPM.

The Calendar and Chart components, part of our premium UI for NativeScript Pro product, will be enhanced with Angular 2 support soon. Learn more and grab a free trial of UI for NativeScript Pro here.

Stay tuned for more!

The latest release pf Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC is here, with updates to the Spreadsheet, Editor, Chart and much more.

The second major release for the year is out, and I’m eager to share the new additions that will increase your productivity and make your apps more functional. The highlights below will review the upgrades to the Spreadsheet, Editor and Chart, as well as to some productivity boosters like the new VS Dashboard template and shared DataSource HtmlHelper.

HTML Editor

As of now the editor will receive more attention and we will do our best to make it as good as the famous RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX. Some of the most voted features from our UserVoice portal are now implemented:

• Markdown Support—The simplicity of Markdown and its restrictive nature makes it the default choice for public-facing content creation scenarios, such as comment forms. The format is also lighter than HTML, which makes it easy on your database:
  

• Auto URL Detection—This nice functionality is now available in all browsers. Just start a word with "http://" or "www." and the editor will automatically transform it into a link when you press the space bar.
• Custom Callbacks for Serializing and Deserializing Content—This is pretty handy for everyone that wants to customize the content of the editor, i.e. you can obtain the content as markdown or plain text, or strip certain HTML tags.
• A pasteCleanup Option—The pasteCleanup is yet another great customization option which allows you to pre-process the clipboard contents. For example, you could strip unwanted styles or tags. You can play with its options in this live pasteCleanup demo.

Spreadsheet

Charts

Among the new chart features is a new series type—verticalBoxPlot, which is useful for comparing distributions between different sets of numerical data, and is well-suited for mobile devices like smartphones in portrait mode. It depicts numerical data by displaying a data distribution summary with six indicators (lower value, first quartile, median, mean, third quartile, upper value) and outliers for each set of data:

Other nice features of the Charts include:

• Support for events when rendering to Canvas
• Pinch to zoom support when using Canvas rendering

Shared DataSource for Multiple MVC Components

Now you can use the DataSource HtmlHelper, which lets you share with other helpers using DataSourceId. This is yet another popular item in the UserVoice portal.

New Dashboard Visual Studio Template

The set of predefined Visual Studio Project Templates for UI for ASP.NET MVC is now extended with a new Dashboard-like template. This is based on the Kendo UI App Template definition, which shipped in R1 2016.

Visual Studio Scaffolding

We extended the VS Scaffolding support to the MVC TreeView, helping you use auto-generated boilerplate code to connect a view (which hosts the treeview) to a controller and the corresponding model definition:

New ASP.NET Core MVC Tag Helpers and Wrappers

I am glad to announce that six of our most popular Kendo UI widgets are now available as TagHelpers. That includes the DatePicker, TimePicker, DataTimePicker, Button, Window and NumericTextBox. You can find detailed information how to configure them in the following help article: Tag Helpers.

And that’s not all—almost all of our UI for ASP.NET MVC wrappers  now officially support ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC1.

Upcoming Support for ASP.NET Core MVC 1.0 RC2 and RTM

As you know, we’re pioneers in supporting .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0. We will also strive to provide support in the Telerik ASP.NET Core MVC components for the RC2 and RTM of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 shortly after their appearance.

More details on the future of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0 can be found in Microsoft's blog post: .NET Core RC2—Improvements, Schedule, and Roadmap.

Additional Information About R2 2016

Visit the links below to read the complete release notes, check out the updated demo app and give it a spin, and learn what’s new in this release:

• Release Notes
• Live Demos
• What’s New page

Release Webinar

If you’re eager to learn more about the R2’16 highlights not only for UI for ASP.NET MVC, but also for other product lines in the DevCraft bundle, join us later today on May 11 or May 12 for a free webinar, with demos of new features and a live Q&A session.

Got Feedback?

If you have feedback about the release, go ahead drop us a line in the comments section below. To share an idea for a new functionality, feature or component, or just to submit your vote for an already requested one, head on over to the Kendo/MVC User Voice portal.

UI for WPF now brings a new Office 2016 look to some of our most sophisticated controls, giving you a sleek and modern look that is highly customizable.

RibbonView, RichTextBox and SpreadSheet Gain Office 2016 Style

A great app requires a great user interface. I’m pleased to announce that with R2 2016 Telerik UI for WPF now supports Microsoft’s fancy Office 2016 look for one of the most sophisticated controls (when it comes to styling) we have—RadRibbonView, RadSpreadsheet and RadRichTextBox.

Even greater, you can get a Windows10 OS experience by integrating these three controls with RadRibbonWindow, which can be styled in the Windows10 OS crisp design.

Syntactic Sugar

Though it's not quite a whole new theme, our Office 2016-inspired theme is based on our popular VisualStudio2013 theme, and therefore inherits all the goodness that comes with it (for example, you can dynamically change the FontSize and FontFamily as well as the default palette brushes that we ship with your own).

We support three color variations: Office 2016 Colorful, Office 2016 Black and Office 2016 Light.

We also wanted to provide the users an accent color preference, in the same way that Microsoft does with each Office 2016 major product they ship— a blue accent color for Word and green for Excel. 

Digging Deeper

The current implementation (which you can freely download as a .zip file at the end of this blog) follows the MVVM pattern, and is pretty much based on changing the default VisualStudio2013 palette brushes to custom ones declaratively as well as the XAML custom markup extensions technique. We won’t go into detail on this, as it's a common approach that we've supported in all our latest themes since Windows8. If you are new to it I highly recommend checking out our documentation topics though.

Still, perhaps you're wondering what the custom markup extensions are for, so let me shed a light on this by digging deeper.

Due to the specifics of the Office 2016 look we needed more brushes that were control independent—for example, a specific brush for the Tab Foreground, Backstage Background, Ribbon Buttons MouseOver/Pressed Visual States, etc. Furthermore we wanted these brushes to be accessible in XAML and ‘sensitive’ to Color Variation change.

Wherever needed we used a simple implicit style with style setters or retemplated those of our controls templates that depended on the custom brushes. So in code we made our own Office2016Palette with the new brushes that are called in XAML via custom markup extensions. The custom markup extensions return shared static Brushes with their Colors bound to an Office2016 Palette. To bind to them in XAML we use the curly braces “{}” notation that tells the XAML preprocessor that it has encountered an extension and the preprocessor itself responds accordingly by evaluating the text inside the curly braces. For example:

Here's how our Office2016Resource extension looks in code (Resources is a custom enumeration of Brush names that we use):

public class Office2016ResourceExtension : MarkupExtension
    {
        public Resources Resource { get; set; }
        public Office2016ResourceExtension({}
        public override object ProvideValue(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            if(serviceProvider == null)
            {
                thrownewArgumentNullException("serviceProvider not found");
            }
            string propertyPath;
            if(Office2016Palette.TryGetResource(this.Resource, out propertyPath))
            {
                Binding binding = newBinding(propertyPath)
                {
                    Source = Office2016Palette.Palette,
                    Converter = newColorToSolidColorBrushConverter(),
                    Mode = BindingMode.OneWay
                };
                returnbinding.ProvideValue(serviceProvider);
            }
            returnnull;
        }
    }

At this point we should have everything fully customized and ready. But how do we change the Color Variations and Accent Color of our products?

The AppearanceManager’s job is to remerge all implicit style files in the application’s global resources every time an Office2016 ColorVariation or Office 2016 AccentBrush changes (the Office 2016 ColorVariations and Office 2016 Accent Brushes, as their names imply, are enumerations that keep our desired Word and Excel based Accent Brushes and Office 2016 color variations). These style files are not only the ones that we ship by default with our VisualStudio2013 theme, but resource dictionaries that contain customized styles and templates needed for the crisp look of the controls where you’ll find the mentioned custom markup extensions. 

You might extend the Office2016Palette with your own Brushes and apply them fairly easy based on this approach.

Give it a Try

Feel free to customize the attached Office 2016 Inspired Application to give it a personal touch, or you can completely replace the current brushes or styles with your own to create a unique visual experience. We’ll be happy to hear your opinion so please drop us a line here or in our support threads! Happy coding!

We recap the Telerik Platform NativeScript webinar, where we discussed how to use NativeScript to develop native mobile apps and gave away some great prizes.

During a recent webinar, the Telerik Platform team provided some in-depth information and demos on how to leverage NativeScript to develop truly native mobile apps. If you were unable to watch the webinar live, you can catch it now on YouTube:

Attendees will know we had not one, but two huge prize raffles! The first was a raffle for webinar attendees and the second was for webinar registrants who set up a free 30-day Telerik Platform trial and created a build of an iOS or Android app.

Before we unveil the winners, let's take a quick look at the enhancements in the latest Telerik Platform release:

• Improved native app development with NativeScript
• Upgraded new Telerik Platform Companion Apps
• Released new Universal Desktop Client for Mac and Windows

For a more comprehensive overview of this Telerik Platform release, please consult our release blog post.

Top Questions and Answers

We received some great questions from webinar attendees. Here is a short list of the most critical questions:

Q: Can you elaborate on the differences between hybrid and native?

A: Hybrid technologies run a mobile app from within a web view and rely more on web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS). A native app uses each platform's technology (iOS or Android) and does not run within a web view, providing better performance. Our NativeScript framework produces truly native apps using JavaScript, CSS and XML for markup.

Q: What are your plans moving forward to support new NativeScript releases in Telerik Platform?

A: We plan to have quick releases with experimental support for NativeScript 2.0 shortly after release and full support by the start of June.

Q: Did you just build and deploy an iOS app without using a Mac?

A: Yes! The Telerik AppBuilder component enables you to build apps for iOS in the cloud so you don't need a Mac or Xcode.

Q: I am planning to develop an app that uses device features like gyroscopes or accelerometers. Does Telerik Platform support these features?

A: This depends on the approach you're looking to employ—hybrid or NativeScript. For hybrid apps, these features are already available. You can access most of the device capabilities using the Cordova core plugins (camera, accelerometer, compass) and additional device and service functionality using custom or verified Cordova plugins (like Apple Watch support). For NativeScript apps, the framework already provides access to device capabilities like camera and geolocation. Other sensors might need to be accessed with native code.

Q: Will NativeScript be updated to work with Windows Phones?

A: Yes! In fact, we already released a preview of our Windows Universal runtime. We hear the feedback loud and clear and are actively looking at how to prioritize Windows Universal support.

Q: Recently when I was working on my hybrid app, I noticed the UI in the simulator looks different compared to the actual device. Is there is anything I can do to avoid these scenarios?

A: It depends on exactly what you’re testing. But we recommend starting out by using the simulator, moving on to any local emulators you have and then moving quickly to debugging on actual devices to avoid any UI surprises

Q: Do we have a time frame for Angular 2 integration?

A: NativeScript supports Angular 2 today! Try out our new Angular 2 getting started guide.

Prize Winners

And now, the part you've all been waiting for. Here is the list of prizes and winners (don't worry, we will be reaching out to all prize winners individually):

Lego Mindstorms Anita K.	iPad Pro Stephen M.	iPhone 6S Shane M.
Nexus 6P John S.	Amazon Echo Robert P.	Apple TV Dusty R.

Thank You

Thanks to everyone who joined the webinar. Don't forget to try your own FREE 30-day trial of the Telerik Platform today!

In our latest release, Telerik UI for Xamarin gains new Windows Universal and NuGet support, helping you save time and develop faster.

During the last few months we’ve been busy enhancing your getting started experience with our UI for Xamarin product, as well as enabling the desired UI functionality on more mobile platforms. Here is what’s new in R2 2016.

Windows Universal Support for Our Xamarin Forms ListView

For the last six months our Xamarin Forms ListView control has enabled people to develop great apps on both iOS and Android. As such a common and popular control though, we couldn't leave it for long without support for the Windows Universal (Windows 8.1) platform.

With our second major release of the year, it's here—our Xamarin Forms ListView now enables you to develop the same cross-platform app on all three popular platforms: iOS, Android, and Windows Universal. We'll enable UWP (Windows 10) support as well, after the Xamarin solution officially announces their own UWP support.

As we continue to increase these efforts, Windows Universal support for the Xamarin Forms DataForm is coming up next.

NuGet Support

Getting the UI for Xamarin bits from our site once is ok. But as you need them on more machines or you need updates, going to the site to download the updated package could be a little inconvenient. In the last few years package managers like NuGet, CocoaPods and NPM have become popular, as they make updating your favorite package breeze. For Xamarin, the package manager is now NuGet, and with our NuGet support you can easily get the latest bits from within your favourite Xamarin IDE—Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio—using your Telerik credentials.

You just need this NuGet server address: https://nuget.telerik.com/nuget. Stay tuned for more on this, as more information on the NuGet usage will follow in a dedicated blog article.

Project Wizard

The Telerik Project Wizard for Xamarin will allow you to easily set up projects with the right OS and API versions.

Dropping iOS 7 support

Unlike in the Android world, which is much more fragmented, iOS consumers tend to upgrade to the latest and greatest iOS version far more quickly. One can easily check the loyalty trend by looking at the AppStore numbers, which show that only about 5% of all users still use iOS 7 or below. Considering this stat and in an effort to make our product even greater by using the latest iOS APIs, we are dropping support for iOS 7, while continuing to support versions iOS 8+.

For more information, you can find the complete list of the UI for Xamarin R2 2016 Release Notes here.

We'd love to hear your feedback, either below in the comments or in our feedback portal. If you have not tried Telerik UI for Xamarin yet, get a free trial now!

Learn what's new in the latest DevCraft release, as we answer all your questions from our release webinar.

Earlier this week, we hosted a series of webinars that highlighted everything new in the Telerik DevCraft R2 2016 release. My co-hosts (Sam Basu and Ed Charbeneau) and I had a great time showing you the latest features in this release and answering your questions. I’d like to thank everyone who was able to attend. Taking time out of your busy schedule isn’t easy so we really appreciate it. As promised, these webinars were recorded and a summary video has been posted to our YouTube channel.

tl/dr: What’s New

I’d recommend reading what’s new in Telerik DevCraft R2 2016 to get a summary of the latest features we’ve implemented. We’ve also published detailed blog posts on each product:

• New Windows and NuGet Support for UI for Xamarin in R2 2016
• Productivity Boosts and More in UI for ASP.NET MVC R2 2016
• Bring Office 2016 Inspired Style to Your App with UI for WPF
• Kendo UI R2 2016 Is Out
• Theming Improvements and Effects in UI for ASP.NET AJAX
• R2 2016 Delivers Top Requested Features for UI for WPF
• Telerik Report Server Gains Data Alerts and More in R2 2016
• Long Awaited Features in R2 2016 for Telerik Reporting
• Modernize Your Applications with UI for WinForms R2 2016

If you missed it or just want to watch it again, you can also catch a replay of the webinar below:

Prize Winners

Historically, we’ve given away prizes to the best question that’s asked during the webinar. This time is no different. The biggest problem we have is trying to find prizes that are cool enough for developers! This time around, I think we did pretty well: ICEORB levitating speakers for two random attendees and Myo gesture armbands for the two best questions.

• The winners of the ICEORB levitating speakers are Matthew Empringham and John Molt
• The winners of the Myo gesture armbands are Oscar Lito Pablo and Arun Singh for their great questions

Your Questions

Ok, let's get to your DevCraft questions. We had many excellent questions come in, and below we answer all of them.

Kendo UI

Do you have backward compatiblity for Angular 1.X with the latest Telerik release?
This support exists today. If new features become available that we can leverage, we’ll definitely try to! :)

Kendo UI with Angular 2: The first components you mentioned will be June-July. Does that mean it will be feature complete by Q1 2017? Or can we expect intermediate updates?
We plan to push a lot of updates to GitHub. This work is ongoing. It’s hard to predict when all of these components will ship since Angular 2 is still under development. :) However, we are working very hard on this.

With your Angular 2 components, will we have access to the “early bits”?
Yes, these will be made available on GitHub. You can track our progress by watching repositories prefixed with “kendo-angular.”

It would be nice if we were able to use the Kendo UI widgets seamlessly with NativeScript. Or, is that now doable?
Well, there’s no DOM in NativeScript so that’s a non-starter to begin with. You may want to check out Telerik UI for NativeScript if you require widgets beyond the ones that ship with NativeScript.

Ah, so we can’t use WebView in NativeScript to use DOM-based widgets?
Oh, you can definitely do that. My point was that you can’t use Kendo UI widgets without FIRST integrating a webview via NativeScript. This done through the web-view module.

Using Kendo UI in NativeScript via WebView is probably something that can be documented in both the Kendo UI and NativeScript official documentation, so we’ll know how to do it correctly, right?
Well, there’s not much to document. The WebView is just a container. From there, you’d use Kendo UI the same way you’d use it elsewhere. It’s not a recommended path since we’re trying to target native controls through NativeScript.

I wish you would implement multi-row drag-and-drop in the Grid widget. It’s a feature that clients ask for and I had to use another UI framework because Kendo UI doesn’t provide it.
Please submit your feature request on the Kendo UI feedback portal. We’ll definitely look at it.

We are using an older version of your components in our web application. What are the options I have to convert the application to a mobile app. Does Kendo UI help without major changes?
Yes, Kendo UI can make responsive web apps that work on Mobile. Alternatively, you can use the Telerik Platform and Apache Cordova to bundle those apps as hybrid apps.

Yes, I realize it’s tough. However, virtual scrolling is less disruptive (more fluid) to the user. I’m hoping you can make it so that when a model gets dirty (due to a keystroke), the model gets added to a queue that protects the model from getting recycled until the modified data gets saved to the database. Reach out if you wish to discuss more. Thank you.
You may want to consider a custom implementation that tracks changes outside the scope of the DataSource. Then, once you’re ready to commit them, push those changes back into the DataSource and perform a one-time update.

Is the Spreadsheet widget available for the React implementation for Kendo UI?
Not at the moment, no.

What is the reasoning behind React? What made the creators of React come up with it and what do they think will make a developer adopt React or even be interested in React?
I’d recommend reading the article entitled, Why React? written by the engineering team who built it.

What is the advantage of using React vs jQuery?
They are difficult to compare. I’d recommend reading about React to better understand what it’s all about.

What do I get from React that I don’t have already on other frameworks such as jQuery?
React isn’t better than jQuery. It’s a different approach. There are numerous articles online that compare the two.

What is Markdown? I’m not familiar with it.
It’s a lightweight markup language. There’s a good description of it up on Wikipedia.

Does the editor support RTF that is like in Wordpad not HTML?
Not out-of-the-box. However, the new serialization APIs would allow you to do this.

Can you give one simple example of Markdown support?
We have published an example of supporting Markdown in the documentation for Kendo UI.

Is there a friendly way to use tools like Bower for Kendo UI? I’ve followed the instructions on the website and it’s not always clear.
Aside from Bower’s website, I’d recommend reviewing our documentation about using Bower with Kendo UI.

Are there plans for Sharepoint 2013–2016?
Not explicitly at the moment. That stated, you can definitely target SharePoint with Kendo UI and the SharePoint REST API. The Office 365 theme looks great.

Does the Spreadsheet control support Excel workbook with macros?
The Spreadsheet control doesn’t support macros in the exact same way at Excel if that’s what you’re asking. Instead, you can defer to JavaScript. We provide hooks to do this.

For Spreadsheet, do you have column like entry? For example, I want to enter multiple years of tax entries vertically in columns and be able to keep on adding new columns as new years.
No, but please consider submitting this as a feature request on the Kendo UI feedback portal.

According to one of your engineers, enabling editing with virtual scrolling in your grid is not recommended and you should consider using paging instead. Are you working to fix this?
We have guidance to do this. It’s not optimal because it’s a tough problem. If you have a big amount of data and want to give the users the editing functionality then you can use virtual scrolling + popup editing, or in-cell editing and paging.

Are you on track to deliver Angular 2.0 Kendo UI compatibiliity by January 2017?
We are on-track for our Angular 2 component work for Kendo UI. You can keep an eye on our progress on GitHub through the kendo-angular query.

Regarding Angular 2.0 support: Will we get a preview version by June-July prior to its release?
Our expectation is to have more bits available on GitHub very soon. We’re already publishing there.

Does the Kendo UI Editor have a Markdown-to-HTML converter?
Not built-in. However, many JavaScript libraries exist to do this. We provide serialization hooks for this.

Does the Report tool support Markdown that comes from the Kendo UI Editor?
I’m not sure if I follow you. There’s no report tool that comes from the Kendo UI Editor.

With the rapid pace of changes in web development tools, such as .NET Core, React, and Angular 2.0, where do you see web development for the .NET developer over the next 2–3 years? What plans are being made at Telerik to accomodate this vision?
Yes, you’re right; things move fast on the web. We will always strive to provide the best possible UI controls and framework pieces. And we do want to allow you to pick your tech stack and be able to use Telerik suites seamlessly. Our goal is to provide the best UI controls on the planet for web, mobile, and desktop apps. This includes .NET-based development targets like UWP, WPF, Xamarin, and others. It’s hard to predict where things will be in 2–3 years. However, we’re confident that we’ll have the best controls out there to support developers building the “Next Big Thing.”

The scaffolding for Kendo UI and Telerik UI for MVC is pretty cool. What is in the upcoming roadmap for additional scaffolding?
We haven’t published anything yet since we just published the R2 release. However, we’ll be posting something soon.

Is the front-end print feature available in the Kendo UI Grid or just the web forms RadGrid? If not, can you explain the difference between these two grids and why they are developed in parallel? Thanks!
Kendo UI has built-in exporting features for many controls. It also has an API for exporting anything on the screen—even standard HTML elements. You can see a webinar all about exporting with Kendo UI on our YouTube page. 2) Many of the controls in AJAX are powered by Kendo UI.

Can you discuss any updates on progress with native Angular 2 components? Specifically, what controls will be included in the initial release and what is the expected release date? Lastly, will a beta preview be available to get an early start?
Keep a close eye on the kendo-angular query on GitHub. You’ll see new repos become available soon. No release dates at the moment, but we’ll definitely have components very soon.

Does Kendo UI now support Material Design that’s consistent with the Google Material Design specs?
We’re always improving it. For example, the R2 2016 release notes cite two fixes.

Will the MVVM framework in Kendo UI continue to be developed?
Yes, we’ll continue to work on it.

Is there a followup webinar on using Kendo UI for React?
Yes, we plan to have a webinar on Kendo UI in June.

Are there presentation materials on using Kendo UI ?
Yes! You can find them in the community section of the Telerik Developer Network.

Will Kendo UI using React affect other libraries already using React?
No, they shouldn’t.

How does React utilize the virtual DOM and the unidirection on data flow for two-way data binding handle security concerns?
I’m not sure how this applies. The virtual DOM and unidirectional data model is there to utilize. It’s not something you’ll directly expose to users. As always, validate any and all input!

Do you have print button feature available for Kendo UI grid for Angular 1.X ?
We have an article in our documentation that covers this.

From the initial testing of porting Kendo UI widgets to React and Angular 2 components, is it expected that the native Kendo UI components will be more performant than the jQuery-based implementations?
We haven’t conducted any perf tests yet.

Are there plans to update Kendo UI to support the latest versions of jQuery?
We just updated the dependency list to include 1.12.3.

Kendo UI with Angular 2: Thanks, great to hear you’re not sticking to the 3x a year release cycle, and that we can start using it with Kendo UI as things progress instead of waiting 3 months :)
We’ll ship components out-of-band on GitHub and roll them up into a release on a quarterly basis. If you want early access, keep an eye on our work up on GitHub.

Telerik UI for Xamarin

Any chance the Telerik Xamarin ListView has touch and hold to reorder items in the ListView control?
Great suggestion. Please submit this as a feature request to the feedback portal for Telerik UI for Xamarin. I’m sure our engineering would love to consider it.

Will UI for Xamarin.iOS work on Xamarin Studio as well?
Yes.

Is Xamarin included in MSDN Subscriptions yet?
I believe so. If not, should be happening very soon.

When you showed controls for Xamarin Forms, are they available for Xamarin without forms?
Yes, all the controls are available for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.

Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC and Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX

Does the TreeView have to use a DbContext or can it use an ADO.NET DataTable?
The TreeView can connect to many data sources but the scaffolding tool needs Entity Framework to operate.

Is formatting for cells preserved when importing an Excel file into the Spreadsheet?
Yes, formatting is preserved.

Your ASP.NET samples do not show truly MVC Styles demo, e.g. TreeView Control needs datasource and should be coming from Controller but we do all those in View itself. Honestly they do not address real-time scenarios of MVC. Please if you can address my concern? I like the way you have just shown the Treeview Control. Thanks!
Please check out our (new) quick start tutorial for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC to see how this works.

What would a circumstance be to use the enable/disable column feature? I would like to introduce this feature to my users but I’m not sure what the purpose would be for this feature.
This is to protect fields by making them read-only.

With the Spreadsheet for Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX, can you do all the functionality shown today via server-side vs front-end code?
These were front-end demos.

When you import an Excel file to the grid, do the formulas come in as well?
Yes! :)

Will the ASP.NET AJAX Spreadsheet tool support hierarchies/groups?
The spreadsheet does support merged cells/columns.

Does the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX RadSpreadsheet control allow the user to copy and paste an Excel spreadsheet into the control?
Yes, You can copy and paste from Excel to the Spreadsheet in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX.

Does the Schedule control in Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC support a timezone set via a dropdown on the page?
The Schedule control is pretty flexible and it sounds possible but I’d ask our support team; they may have an example to get you going.

How you can use Markdown in the Editor for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC?
You’ll have to do this either front-end through the serialization APIs that we showed during the demo, or you’ll have to write the code yourself if serializing on the server side.

If I need to print only specfic controls from a page which contain data/records, does the new print option have that facility? Or do I need to use per grid single print option?
Yes, this can be done. However, you would have to write JavaScript on the front-end to control that.

Since you showed tag helpers from Microsoft as well, does this mean that Razor syntax is going away?
Razor is not going anywhere. TagHelpers are a new addition to Razor. Razor may also have a bigger role in .NET in the future, possibly replacing other technologies like XSLT.

So Razor and TagHelpers can be used interchangeably it appears? How long before all of Kendo UI is available in TagHelper?
Yes, both can co-exist. The TagHelpers demoed are available today.

Why should I use TagHelper if I already use Razor?
Both have advantages and disadvantages. TagHelpers appear more like HTML and are easier to nest elements inside of. Razor can have a fluent API, which many people enjoy using.

How do you share data from backend using tag helpers?
TagHelpers can pull from your model just as HTML Helpers can.

Will you offer any tool to convert from Razor to TagHelper?
This is not on our roadmap at this time. But, you should find the APIs very similar.

Is it necessary to use the .NET Core 1.0 to have this working?
TagHelpers are only available in ASP.NET Core.

Can we have a Telerik radio button control in which we can change the color of the button on change or based on page validation, we can change the color. I was finding some problems in the past so I used a normal HTML input radio control with label and CSS to do the same thing.
This question would be best answered by our support team. Please feel free to submit a ticket, they are excellent!

With ASP.NET Core 1.0 scheduled to hit version 1 in late June, will your MVC controls be ready at that time and be fully supported with it?
Our Razor HTML helpers are already compatible with .NET Core (even on Mac and Linux). TagHelpers are being added as we complete them, several are ready now and being shown it the demo.

Can I use single print option for multiple Telerik controls in a single page?
Your browser has that built-in, no? I’m not sure what you’re asking for here.

ASP.NET AJAX: What is the point of printing the Grid as it is displayed on the screen? Printing the data in the Grid, including all rows/pages is what users want.
We also receive suggestions where users would like to customize the view and print WYSIWYG. You can tie into events to include items for your own scenarios.

When printing from the Grid in ASP.NET AJAX, is there functionality to customize the printout? For example, I want to add a confidentiality message to the bottom of each printed page.
You should be able to use front-end events to manipulate the view before it is printed.

With the new Grid print button—is it possible to print all rows within the grid, not just the rows that are displayed on the current page (if the grid is paged)?
Yes, you would need to toggle those items into view when the event is triggered.

What is the best way according to you to learn using Telerik controls for MVC development for web and mobile. There are way too many help options online, and it's difficult to pick and chose. We end up looking at all of them.
We have a brand new quick start guide. Look for it in our docs under Tutorials. It's about to be shown in the video.

Do you have any examples of the Spreadsheet used in an Aurelia application?
Not at the moment. However, check out Rob Eisenberg’s article entitled, “Aurelia and Kendo UI” to read how it’s done.

When will we have full feature coverage for ASP.NET Core 1.0?
Microsoft has a lot of churn with APIs in .NET Core right now. However, we are supporting it in its current state. We have a roadmap for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC available. Plus, we will have some new demos in today’s webinar.

I was working with TreeView and I needed to show 30,000 nodes. The page would freeze, and showed nothing, like it can not handle that amount. Is there a limit for nodes to show? I ended using the Grid with sub-Grid controls.
30,000 nodes is a lot for a TreeView. You may want to consider applying a lazy-loading approach through a HierarchicalDataSource.

With the ASP.NET AJAX Spreadsheet, are you able to link it to data coming from a database?
This is supported two ways: either via proxy back to your server or through the front-end via JavaScript. In either case, we support populating the Spreadsheet with data coming from these locations. However, you are required to write the code that does this; we don’t do this auto-magically for you.

Does the TreeView support drag and drop?
Yes.

With the Grid Print, in the demo it is printing just the current view (i.e. current page). Is it able to print the whole grid?
It’s best to export as a PDF in that instance, which is something we support.

Can the grid read data from a nosql db like Azure DocumentDb?
We don’t provide any provider-specific integration points out of the box. Instead, we support integrating data from remote locations in the form of XML, JSON… along with OData and JSON-P. To pull in data from Azure DocumentDb, you’d have to interface via HTTP(S).

Telerik UI for Silverlight

Any plans to migrate Silverlight controls to HTML5?
No.

Is Telerik going to stop support for Silverlight?
No, we continue to support UI for Silverlight.

With Silverlight going away, does Telerik have any plans for alternative desktop cross-platform solutions that are not web-based?
There aren’t many solutions for desktop that are cross-platform that AREN’T web-based as the moment. That stated, Electron 1.0 just shipped and you can use Kendo UI with it to build out apps.

Teleirk UI for WinForms

Does the app converter overwrite existing code or make a ‘new’ Telerik app or should you back up the code before converting?
It doesn’t backup your project beforehand so do make sure to backup before running the tool.

If Microsoft is not continuing to grow WinForms, what environment do they recommend to program in besides web languages? WPF or something else?
Well, they are promoting UWP for Windows 10. So, that's where you’ll apply your XAML skills.

What are the requirements for the Conversion Tool?
Currently, it requires Visual Studio 2015 Update 2.

Does the Conversion Tool convert the whole project? Or, one form at a time?
The Conversion Tool will convert your entire project in one operation.

How does the Windows Forms Converter handle other third party controls?
Currently, we convert a subset of controls from System.Forms.

Telerik UI for WPF and Telerik UI for UWP

Will these controls behave in the same fashion as your Silverlight UI controls? (The user experience)
We try our best to preserve the UX across each of the platforms we support. However, it’s never a one-to-one UX experience.

To what extent can we expect the existing XAML controls (WPF/SL) to be migrated over to UWP? Xamarin?
I think they are going to be separate for a while and we’ll keep investing towards both desktop and mobile platforms. XAML tooling improvements benefit all stacks.

Do you have an opinion as to the best way to take a WPF application to UWP on a migration path?
Great question. Let me expand on this during Q/A.

Checked the app store, still no UWP Telerik Examples yet?
We ship our examples on your account page at telerik.com. When you follow the “Browse all product files” link under the Windows Universal product, at the bottom, under Demos and Sample Application, you will find a download link for XAML Dashboard. You can also find the Telerik Controls Examples source code in your UI for Windows Universal installation folder. When you use the automatic installer, apart from the actual controls installation, you also get the examples solution. You will find a shortcut to the solution on your Desktop and the actual project in ~\Telerik\UI for Windows Universal QX 201X\Demos.

Miscellaneous

It has been a while since we have seen any updates to Data Access with any of the Dev Craft releases. Are there any future plans for Data Access?
We published the latest release a couple of months ago.

I think I heard that all of this is available for download now from the Telerik Control Panel?
That’s correct. All of the bits are available to download now through the Telerik Control Panel or through your account on telerik.com.

Wow! How do I get my copy of DevCraft Complete?
Start by visiting the Telerik DevCraft page on our website.

What updates are being made to the Testing Framework?
We don’t publish a roadmap for our testing framework. FWIW, our roadmap for Test Studio is available.

Dose Telerik have some kind of Android simulator for apps developed using Telerik controls.
Yes, you can use Telerik AppBuilder for this.

Is there somewhere suggested addons (such as the ones mentioned Gulp, Github, etc.) are listed with descriptions of what they might be used with and how they would be useful?
I’d recommend the article entitled, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Modern JavaScript Tooling” by Marcin Grzywaczewski.

It’s nice to support all those technologies. But where is the guiding advice when to use what? Xamarin, NativeScript, Angular, ASP.NET MVC, Kendo UI, UWP, you name it. When would Igo down which road?
Each of these technologies target different platforms. You’ll have to consider your requirements when looking at what approach to take.

Do you have plans on supporting React Native at one point?
Not at the moment. Instead, we like NativeScript.

Thank You!

Thank you to those who attended the webinar and who asked questions after. As always, if you have a suggestion feel free to leave it in the comments here or on our feedback portal.

NativeScript 2.0 was just released. Learn more about how it will help you code high performant cross-platform native mobile apps in our upcoming webinar.

Our NativeScript framework addresses two key goals in developing Mobile applications: writing cross-platform apps with a single code base while keeping native-level performance. Our solution builds on a high-performance bridge between JavaScript and the native platforms, extended with modules, a plugin system, and a markup language; all supported by the Telerik Platform tools.

NativeScript and Angular 2.0

We released NativeScript 1.0 in May 2015, and last week, a year after, we released NativeScript 2.0.  NativeScript 2.0 has many new features but a key one is support for Angular 2.0, the brand-new version of the uber-popular AngularJS framework (see stackoverflow popularity report). Angular 2.0 now allows different types of renderers and that is where NativeScript 2.0 fits: you can now write a Web app and a Native App using the Angular 2.0 framework, sharing most of the code and using NativeScript for the, cross-platform, mobile code. It’s a win-win-win arrangement.

NativeScript 2.0 and Angular 2 together lead to very productive teams. Last week we were on stage at  NG-CONF, together with Rangle and Google’s Angular team, showing off the mobile app we developed with the Kiva team in a few weeks. Check out the recording.

Join us for a Webinar

Tuesday next week (May 17^th, 8am PT, 11am ET) we are hosting an online webinar to present NativeScript 2.0.  The panel of experts includes John Papa (Google Developer Expert) and our own Burke Holland and TJ VanToll.  It will be a great event; register here.

And if you want to whet your appetite for the new functionality, you can try it out now in your smartphone.  Download our Kitchen Sink Demo App at the Apple  App Store or on Google play and have fun!

You’ll soon start seeing our products referenced as “Telerik by Progress”—a signal that you now benefit from the strength of Progress, incorporating the Telerik vision and energy you know and love.

When we started Telerik nearly 14 years ago, we had a bold objective—to be the #1 UI vendor in the world. In those 14 years, we worked relentlessly to establish ourselves as a leader in .NET, HTML5 and Mobile UI. With our success, we went beyond UI and brought to market many additional tools for testing, debugging, coding and more to aid the productivity of developers.

In all those years we stayed true to our mission—to innovate and help our customers stay on top of the avalanche of technologies and challenges that came their way.

When Telerik joined the Progress family in 2014, we embarked on a journey to bring together the best of two trailblazing organizations that catered to developers. Together, our vision, values and dedication to the developer community are more impactful than ever. Unifying as Progress is an important step towards expanding our product and solutions portfolio—all designed to help developers solve the most pressing application development challenges.

So, while the logos and signs are changing, you’ll still get the same great family of products—UI frameworks and app development tools our 1.9 million-strong developer community relies on. We’ll always keep our focus on delivering the industry’s most powerful developer experiences, responsive support and aggressive roadmap influenced by our customers’ needs.

Best regards,

Vassil Terziev

Chief Innovation Officer, Progress

Co-founder, Telerik

Read about the new Progress brand and digital transformation vision from Progress CEO, Phil Pead

In this helpful guide, learn how to use the Kendo UI grid widget in AngularJS projects. It includes code snippets, a sample app and links to other relevant resources.

With the continuously growing popularity of the AngularJS framework, the need for ready-to-use components grows as well. Our Kendo UI framework provides just that by enabling developers to easily create complex AngularJS UI.

Why Is the Kendo UI Grid Easy to Use in AngularJS Apps?

All you have to do to add Kendo UI Grid (or any other widget from the Kendo UI suite) to your AngularJS application is to include the proper Kendo UI libraries (Example 1) and declare dependency on “kendo.directives” (Example 2):

Example 1

Example 2

or

There are several approaches that could be used for configuring the widget, but we will take a look at the one where all options are defined in the controller. For this scenario we are using the k-options attribute to specify the object with the defined options:

You can test and examine the entire example in this dojo.

How Does Kendo UI Grid Save Development Time? 

Creating a grid structure in AngularJS could be easily achieved with ng-repeat, for example, but implementing complex functionality for it would be a huge and time consuming task. Here is where the 100+ built-in features of Kendo UI Grid that can be enabled and defined “the Angular way” come in handy. Here are just a few of them:

• CRUD operations
• Paging, sorting, filtering, grouping and hierarchy
• Export
• Responsiveness
• Built-in themes and option for creating custom ones

Other time-savers include the flexibility of data binding options and the variety of user-customizable templates that the grid widget supports. Whether you decide to go with local or remote data (Web Service, WebSocket, SignalR, Telerik Backend Services, etc.), to create a DataSource object on your own, or allow the widget to create it internally, data binding and enabling CRUD operations is as easy as it gets in the context of displaying and editing data.

As for the templates, they allow you to customize almost every element of the grid: headers, footers, cells, rows, editors, filters, detail rows and more.

How Can I Call Out the Kendo UI Grid in an AngularJS App?

Very often you will need a reference to the widget in order to call methods or retrieve some information from your controller. To get that reference in the controller you just need to assign a name to the kendo-grid attribute:

Once you have set a name to the kendo-grid attribute, you can access the object as a scope variable:

$scope.grid1

Can I Initialize the Kendo UI Grid in Other Widgets?

This is a very common requirement and there is a perfect attribute that allows nesting Kendo UI widgets in AngularJS. The main problem with nested widgets is the sequence of their initialization, and this is what the k-ng-delay directive resolves. With the k-ng-delay directive you can ensure that the parent widget is initialized before you initialize the nested one. This directive is also useful for creating dynamic column structure, based on definition coming from the server.  

Can I See an AngularJS Grid Demo/Sample App? 

Yes, you can test the Kendo UI Grid widget in an AngularJS application in the following online demo. Since the kendo-grid directive initializes Kendo UI Grid, you can take a look at the other online demos for the Grid and familiarize yourself with the available features that the widget exposes.

For a more comprehensive AngularJS Kendo UI demo, take a look at our sample app, showcasing some of the most popular Kendo UI widgets, such as Scheduler, Grid, TabStrip, Charts and Map in a real world scenario.

Does the Kendo UI Grid Come with Support? 

The Kendo UI Grid and its AngularJS integration is officially supported as part of the Kendo UI product. More information on the product and the available plans could be found here.

Does the Kendo UI Grid Come with Built-In Themes?  

The Kendo UI Grid comes with a set of 16 built-in themes, which can be applied by adding the corresponding CSS file for that particular theme. In addition to the built-in themes, we have created the online Kendo UI Theme Builder, which allows you to further customize the appearance of the widgets by using a built-in theme as a starting point.  

Which Version of Angular Does the Kendo UI Grid Work With? 

Currently, Kendo UI supports AngularJS 1.x. For Angular 2, our goal is to rebuild the Kendo UI widgets and make them true UI components by the Angular 2 definition, with no jQuery dependency. Angular 2 support for Kendo UI Grid is expected at the end of 2016. See the full roadmap.

How Can I Get the AngularJS Grid?

You can see how all this works as soon as you download the Kendo UI free trial and take it for a spin. The grid is available as part of the Kendo UI suite, which includes 70+ UI components for building HTML5 and JavaScript apps faster.

Related Resources:

• What to Expect in 2016 for Kendo UI With Angular 2 and More [article]
• Essential Tools for Building SPAs with AngularJS [article]
• The Future of JavaScript: 2016 and Beyond [whitepaper]
• A Fast Angular 2 Setup with Components and the Component Router [article]

Jim Holmes, Telerik Developer Expert for Test Studio, talks about software development in the enterprise.

This post is the second in a series featuring our Telerik Developer Experts, community members who represent the best of our products. Read our first post, and meet more Experts here.

What’s your background, professionally?

"Eclectic," in a word. I spent 11 years in the Air Force maintaining radars while flying on surveillance aircraft, plus I managed small computers when I wasn't flying. Since then I've spent time in pretty much every role in software delivery and maintenance: customer relations, support, development, program management, testing. I also worked in wine retail for six months. Lousy pay, best homework ever.

Where are you based and why?

I live in Ashland, Oregon. We moved here in May of 2015 in order to be closer to my family and California, plus we live on the side of a mountain and can easily walk into town. It's a wonderful change from 14 years in the very flat Midwest.

With whom are you working?

I'm an Executive Consultant with Pillar Technology. I also have my own consulting business, Guidepost Systems. Both of these allow me to do neat engagements around testing, quality, whole-team software delivery, and communication.

What projects are you working on now?

I've spent the last year helping a Fortune 10 auto manufacturer modernize their testing practices as well as change the company's overall software delivery processes. I've been working at the strategic level with their Quality Center of Excellence, plus I've also been in the trenches with one specific program team. 

I also work with several other project teams across Pillar to help support changes in testing, quality and delivery.

What’s the most interesting project you’ve done recently? Tell us about it!

Without a doubt it's the tactical level program I'm on right now. That team has totally transformed how they've worked in a very "traditional" environment. Instead of slow, outdated processes they've fully drunk the Agile KoolAid and are shipping frequent high-quality releases. We've currently zero bugs in production! More importantly, the testers have exploded in their skills. It's really fun to talk through new concepts and watch them implement things. They're also at the point where they're solving their own problems, which is incredibly wonderful.

I spend 50% of each month away from my family while I'm on-site with this client. I've repeatedly told them I love getting on the plane to fly to work because it's an amazing environment. Without a doubt it's the best project I've ever been on in my entire career as a software professional.

What are some challenges you are encountering now in your work?

Two things: Basic craftsmanship skills and horrible tooling at clients.

Software craftsmanship is always the hardest part of any project. It's a constant struggle getting developers and testers to be proficient at writing maintainable software. Our industry and academia both fail at getting newcomers properly introduced to things like SOLID design principles, testing, communication, etc. It's a long, slow process.

Tooling at some clients, particularly enterprise ones, is a challenge because those clients get locked in to poor tools that hinder teams from delivering at their full potential. Procurement teams, usually far removed from delivery teams, buy tools with big support contracts but little actual adoption across the industry. Those tools often hinder or outright block fast delivery of lean, high-value software. As a example, I'm struggling with writing and testing functionality using a horrible JavaScript grid product. It's difficult to develop with, and extraordinarily tough to write automated tests for. I keep muttering "I'd have had this done a month ago if I was using the Kendo Grid!"

Which of our products do you use and why?

I've been a long-time user of Test Studio (I was the Evangelist and later Director of Engineering for Test Studio some years back!) and I continue to be a huge fan of it. Its ease of use and power are extraordinary. It's a great tool for organizations using whole-team delivery: Testers can quickly write flexible, valuable tests, then pair up with developers to write a small amount of code for setup/teardown, database interactions, etc. Plus, it's just flat fun to use, which is sort of a shock in our industry.

I also use Kendo UI controls for demos, workshops, and training. I've been focused on testing for quite awhile, so I don't have time to relearn dev skills every time I'm trying to build training material or prototypes. Kendo makes it a snap for me to quickly get great functionality wired up without a lot of hassle. 

Finally, I'm looking forward to playing with the Xamarin controls very soon. I'm building some training videos for the Test Studio folks and I'm excited to dig around and kick the tires with the Telerik Xamarin controls and Test Studio's mobile test features!

What’s the biggest software pain point, in your opinion, in the mind of your partners/clients?

For the delivery teams it's ease of adoption. How long is it going to take us to learn how to use the tool/framework/whatever? Secondly, is it flexible enough to let us evolve the software we're building? What sorts of dead ends and speed bumps will we run in to?

The business side of the house in our clients are always worried about speed of delivery and quality of releases. I'm engaged with Fortune 100 and Fortune 10 clients. "Speed of delivery" for them is dramatically different than startups; however, it's a similar fundamental for them. How can we get our teams more effective in how they're building and releasing software? What tools can we leverage to help out with that, and how do we avoid getting trapped with tools/frameworks/etc. that are in a constant state of flux?

Huge organizations also have less tolerance for risk. Deployment of releases and their dependencies is often a huge workflow, so quality is actually even more important than in smaller, more nimble organizations. That surprises many people I talk with, but look at it this way: How would your mindset about what you're building change if you knew it would be weeks or even MONTHS to deploy a bug fix?

Thankfully these large, slow moving organizations are finally beginning to change and adopt somewhat faster, leaner practices. Slowly.

We’re excited and honored to announce big wins from the American Business Awards, CRN and others. Vote for Progress to help us achieve even more.

We are really proud to share that we have won a total of nine awards over the last two months. This is really amazing recognition of the hard work we do to make great products that help our customers, and we want to say again a big Thank You to the Progress community. You and your commitment are making Progress a true force of transformation!

The Stevie Awards are the world’s premier business awards, and we have just won five of them!

We received three prizes at the American Business Awards (a.k.a. the American Stevies):

• Sitefinity and Sitefinity DEC won the gold for Content Management solution
• DataDirect won silver for Big Data solution
• Telerik Platform won bronze for Mobile Development solution

We received two more recognitions at the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards for Innovation in Technology Development:

• Sitefinity won the gold again
• Telerik Platform won silver

We also won in three separate awards programs organized by CRN:

• CRN’s 2016 Partner Program Guide—we are a 5-star vendor for our Progress Partner+ program
• CRN 2016 Mobility 100—Telerik Platform is among the 15 Coolest Mobile App Development Platforms
• CRN Women of the Channel—our own Kimberly King won for the 7^th year in a row and now she's also in CRN’s Power 100 list

CRN, who has recognized us before, is a respected and longstanding resource for channel-related information and strategic guidance. It is the de-facto standard for the market.

OpenEdge is recognized as one of the top 25 Workflow Solutions Transforming Business. We have been chosen among the 350 best companies in the industry by the CIO Applications magazine. You can see an article, written by our General Manager of OpenEdge, Colleen Smith, in the magazine here.

We’re honored to have been recognized by these respected organizations. But you can help us achieve even more!

Vote for Progress

Progress is nominated for three highly sought after prizes in a total of six categories—the American Business Awards (People’s choice Awards), the Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) Readers’ Choice Awards and the German Cloud Computing Insider Readers' Choice Awards. We have won eight awards at The Stevies since 2013 and were named a winner by DBTA in 2015. All of this happened thanks to you. Please cast your votes once again for Progress.

Here is how:

1. The Stevies nominations include:

• Mobile Development Solution: Telerik Platform—Short Code: N104A
• Content Management Solution: Sitefinity + DEC—Short Code: J491I
• Big Data Solution: DataDirect—Short Code: G191H

It’s really easy to vote—you just need to open this link, copy-paste the short code above and then confirm that you are not a bot. It takes only a few seconds. (Please note that you need to vote separately for each category.) Voting will remain open until June 3.

Oneperson is allowed to vote multiple times and there are no limitations. It’s mobile friendly, too.

2. The DBTA Readers’ Choice nomination includes:

• Best Cloud Solution: Progress DataDirect Cloud

To vote for the DBTA Readers’ Choice Awards open this link. Voting will remain open until May 20.

3. The German Cloud Computing Insider Readers' Choice Awards 2016. Progress is nominated as a company for two categories:

• PaaS—Platform as a Service
• Cloud Marketing Tools

The website is in German, but even if you don’t speak German it’s really easy to vote. You just need to open this link, and click on the big grey button pictured below. Voting will remain open until Aug 31.

Then find the Progress logo by scrolling down on the list of nominations to categories “d. PaaS – Platform as a Service” and “g. – Cloud Marketing Tools.” Then click on the (old) Progress logo. That’s it.

Thank you once again for your support!   

In this tutorial, find out how to turn RadEditor into a Markdown editor easily using custom filters and some external JS libraries.

Recently, more and more tools have started using Markdown instead of HTML to enable users to create content for the web. The syntax is very simple, which allows end users to quickly learn it and start creating well-structured content. Later, by using neat libraries, Markdown is translated to HTML and sent to the browser.

Instead of searching for new tools that will help you support Markdown, you can keep using RadEditor UI for ASP.NET AJAX and adjust it a bit to give you the best results in terms of Markdown syntax.

This blog post is inspired by a recently created code library thread that provides the solution to the case here. You can take a look at it by following this link—How to Turn RadEditor into Markdown Editor. Although the code explains it all, I would like to go a bit deeper and explain how RadEditor’s flexible architecture contributes to the solution.

The final result that is achieved after following this post is illustrated in this video here:

Understanding Content Filters

Content filters in RadEditor are a powerful way to control the HTML content that the end user generates. If you are interested in the documentation you can find it here: Content Filters. You can see that there is a long list of useful, ready-to-use filters, but what we are interested in is creating our own filter that will transform HTML to Markdown and vice versa. How this is possible?

Filters, basically, get the HTML from the content area and transform it to a string before going to HTML mode or submitting the content. Creating a custom content filter will enable us to manipulate this HTML string and transform it to whatever we would like.

How to Convert HTML to Markdown

Luckily, there are plenty of tools and libraries to do that. For our situation, however, we need tools that do that only on the client as content filters run only client-side code.

You can use any JS library you find suitable. I considered using these ones: markdown-js and html-md. The libraries’ documentation explains best how to use them. We will just download them and add them to the page:

Implementing the Custom Filter

Make sure you are creating a string filter: this.set_isDom(false). Using true argument will create a DOM filter, which is not the right decision for our task. Next, just use the proper tool implementation to convert HTML to Markdown in the getHtmlContent method. Add the one for Markdown to HTML in the getDesignContent.

Having this, you will see that any HTML from Design mode will turn to Markdown in HTML mode.

Simplifying Tools for better UX

As Markdown supports very simple content formatting, many tools and their complexities are rather unneeded. Also, modules and the Preview mode are not useful in terms of Markdown editing, so we will disable them. You can also adjust the text of the HTML button to prevent possible confusion.

ASP.NET

C#

VB

Summary

With the code I showed you so far you can modify RadEditor to generate Markdown instead of HTML, and provide a very basic and simplistic UI that will help users to create well-structured content.

One more benefit about having Markdown is that you fill your database with less content. Which is certainly good. Still, you should consider getting the HTML from that Markdown when rendering this in a browser or in an email client. This, however, I think, will be a simple task for you after reading this post.

Cool bonus: As of Kendo UI R2 2016, the Kendo UI Editor is also capable of such a modification (generating Markdown). To find out how, just follow this how-to article—Create Markdown Editor.

Do you intend to use Markdown? Would you use RadEditor to create Markdown? Are you going to drop HTML in favor of Markdown? What do you love about Markdown? If you have any thoughts about these topics, I would love to hear them, so please do post a comment below. 

Telerik Analytics helps navigate a product’s growth through actionable, data driven insights. Increase engagement with users, improve app performance and product usage, and much more.

Decisions, Decisions

Leaders are often faced with tough decisions to drive their businesses forward, but those decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. Leaders need to convince key stakeholders on their team or organization that their decisions are indeed sound, and will lead their teams on the path of glory. Therefore, data driven decisions are key for driving progress on a day to day basis.

In today’s competitive world, customer expectations are changing constantly, and the bar is being pushed continuously. To know whether or not your product is relevant, it is really important to have a pulse on customer expectations. In a constantly changing and competitive marketplace, having the right information at the right time can make a big difference to your strategy. Thus, analytics is key to formulating business strategy, so that you can not only understand where you stand, but also plan for the future.

Industry research by Salesforce directly suggests that high performance embraces a culture of Analytics. When leaders base their strategic product decisions on analytics, they are in a much better position to drive profitability of their products, which is a key success metric across industries.

Another very interesting trend (page 11 of the abovementioned survey) is that successful companies use analytics for several use cases, like driving operational efficiencies, improving existing products or services and features, and identifying new revenue streams, to name a few. I’m reminded of this interesting article in which Facebook’s internal AI tool is used by different teams for use cases that the AI product team had never imagined.

Challenges Product Managers and Software Development Managers Face

In any business, some of the key leaders shaping a product’s growth story are Product Managers and Software Development Managers, who are always under pressure to make sound, well-informed and business critical decisions.

Product managers are challenged with launching products, growing them through revenue or adoption goals, increasing retention and reducing churn, prioritizing support for older releases, and delivering best of the breed user experience. On the other hand, Software Development Managers are always busy negotiating the product roadmap with product managers, managing product release schedules, prioritizing older releases, coordinating testing, minimizing bugs and delivering better app performance.

Having the Right Insights for Success

Are you beginning to see a connection? In reality, they both need to know about product insights and user behavior patterns to do their job effectively. These insights are: who makes up the most loyal audience, where are they located, what are the popular user flows while using the product, what are the most used features, what are the frequent app errors, what are the user traffic patterns, what is the peak usage time and what is the average time spent in the product, just to mention some (but not all) key trends.

Truly, for them, knowledge IS power. Armed with the above insights, they can make truly intelligent and informed decisions that they can defend to their management and sleep soundly after making.

Telerik Analytics Can Help

Telerik Analytics helps navigate a product’s growth through actionable, data driven insights. These powerful real-time analytics can be leveraged to engage with users, make data driven decisions, improve application performance and monitor product usage. Product Managers can know their audience’s usage habits, track their loyalty and target them better for monetization. It also becomes easy to prioritize the product roadmap, optimize engineering dollars and improve application user experiences by eliminating crashes.

A unique aspect of Telerik Analytics is that it works with any app (desktop/web/mobile), any device (desktop/mobile/tablet/wearable) and any technology (.NET, Java, Android, C++ & more).

Ok, but how Can Telerik Analytics Really Help?

That was just a teaser. Let’s take a closer look at how Product managers and Software Development Managers can excel in their roles with Telerik Analytics.

Product Managers can stay ahead of the game by knowing which features are used most by users. This can be used to prioritize product roadmaps and keep engineering focused on features that matter most to the end user. Product Managers can also track user loyalty to know whether the latest release features are resonating with the users or not, which can be used to unlock monetization opportunities.

It's also possible to paint a better picture of their audience through demographic analysis and uncover their usage pattern. This makes it easier to strategically think about sending them the right promotions and offers.

Product Managers often need to decide whether it is worth supporting older releases or environments or not. Limiting support for environments can also translate into better testing for the environments that are more popular with the user base, leading to better product stability.

Telerik Analytics helps improve user experience by automatically capturing crash reports and presenting them on a centralized dashboard for further action. Software Development Managers can instantly receive detailed stack traces for engineering to act on. In addition, performance bottlenecks can be detected (and acted upon) by measuring the duration of specific end-user actions. After all, five star reviews matter for driving user adoption.

Mapping Business Benefits to Charts

So essentially, it boils down to three top abilities: tracking engagement, tracking audience and tracking install mix. Telerik Analytics delivers these benefits through interactive, rich charts. Lets look deeper.

Through the “Most used features,” “Time spent per feature,” “Sessions/day” and “Number of sessions” charts, Product Managers can validate the design of the application and grow engagement by focusing on the features that are more important. Through the “Loyalty Cohort” chart, it is possible to know the key audience that is really enjoying your product. Lastly, there are several charts on “Browsers,” “Architecture,” “Languages” and “OS versions,” which can be used to prioritize future release decisions or cut off support for a specific combination altogether, if the userbase is negligible.

See it in Action

Check out Telerik Analytics today. Take advantage of the exciting business benefits by requesting a demo with the sales team. You also have the option of exploring an analytics trial experience for desktop, web or mobile apps by requesting a trial of Telerik Platform for the Enterprise Plan.

Coming up Next

We really want to tell you our story as to how the Telerik Product Managers used Telerik Analytics to make our own products better for our customers. Keep your eyes peeled for future blogs on case studies soon. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Exciting times ahead!