Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

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Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

posted @ Tuesday, June 10, 2008 1:10 PM | 6 Comments

One of the things I love about the Microsoft developer ecosystem is the partner channels that are enabled to create great add-ons to our platforms and frameworks. Our partners in this space usually get to the better implementations before we do, taking on the task of filling some gaps in unique implementations while our teams can focus on providing the best framework for enabling that construction.

In December of last year, Telerik showed their intentions of making a control suite for Silverlight (then v1.1). Well now that beta 2 is released for Silverlight 2, they’ve updated their RadControls for Silverlight 2 suite and have now provided a downloadable CTP of the suite.

Their controls implement support for DataBinding, the new VisualStateManager model, Templates/Styles, etc. Some of the controls they are providing are some that you may find interesting or enhance the existing control suite from the Silverlight core:

Menu
TreeView
Upload
RadCube
RadNumericUpDn
RadProgressBar
Animation framework

One of their key features is they’ve decided to make these source code compatible with WPF. The full WPF are not yet available. You can download the CTP for free right now on their site and view some sample implementations on their sample site.

Telerik is widely known for providing great products and this is really great to see them provide controls for Silverlight that are also compatible with WPF. I’m excited to see this control suite evolve to release state and perhaps more from the Silverlight team at Telerik!

tags: silverlight, wpf, ria, vsm, visualstatemanager, telerik, radcontrols, xaml

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

Comments

Kevmeister

6/10/2008 4:08 PM | # re: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

ComponentOne is another vendor that has been aligning itself with Silverlight and seems to be producing a good set of quality controls for the platform. Their SL2B2 control suite will supposedly be out in the next week or so, as they make the appropriate changes to move from Beta 1 to Beta 2.

So it's good to see the control suite vendors jumping on the Silverlight platform.

However, I find it irksome that Microsoft have not provided a TreeView control in Silverlight, nor a ComboBox, nor a PasswordTextBox, and these fall quite reasonably into the "standard controls" category, and they are certainly provided on other platforms such as WinForms. Let's hope that we see some of these controls becoming part of the platform in the near future.
timheuer

6/10/2008 5:50 PM | # re: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

@kevmeister: ScottGu has said that there will be more controls coming including a combobox in the final release (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/06/06/silverlight-2-beta2-released.aspx#6255133)
Rodrigo Ratan

6/10/2008 7:05 PM | # re: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

Nice work, but I expect to have their Silverlight 1.0 version of controls updated to be SL2B2 compatible since they are not working with SL1.0
Valentin Stoychev [Telerik]

6/10/2008 11:23 PM | # re: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

Hello Rodrigo - we recevied your request and we are working on fixing that issue. We will release the new version within the next few hours.

As for bringing more controls in the Telerik Silverlight 2 suite - you can count on this - we will have an update of the suite pretty soon bringing another 4 controls - Window, ComboBox, Slider and PanelBar :)
Harlequin

6/18/2008 12:20 PM | # re: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

Is a new version coming? Think someone said 2 hours, and it's been 8 days.
Reuben

4/22/2009 5:55 AM | # re: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

I've evaluated both telerik and componentone, we are ending up going with Telerik but it's a close call. It really came down to certain controls being offered by Telerik, we could use on our current project...