What better way to spice up your Wednesday than by checking out some videos on one of the hot new controls in the RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF control suites? I certainly can't think of one! RadDataBars allow for a quick and easy display of data in a readable format, perfect for displaying KPIs or other business-centric data within your applications when what you need is an easy way to compare values or track progress over time.

For a quick recap, XAMLflix = Videos + Projects covering all of the controls in both the RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF control suites. We are revamping the entire video library with fresh new content based on the latest and greatest versions of our controls, complete with projects so you can grab the same code you see in the video and run with it.

RadDataBars - Making Data Display Easy

One of the best things about the RadDataBars is that they are as quick to learn as they are easy to use. Using any of the three types of DataBars, you can quickly add these controls to your projects for displaying key information in an easily readable format. Add the ability to customize the look and feel of the bars and you have a valuable tool to use for displaying KPIs or building dashboards that offer an immersive at-a-glance look at your important data.

• Getting Started with RadDataBars - In this video we will take a look at the three versions of RadDataBars - DataBars, StackedDataBars, and Stacked100DataBars. We'll walk through creating all three versions of the DataBar as well as what properties set them apart, including how to get data displaying in each. (Download the project!)
• Customizing DataBars - Once you've gotten comfortable with the three types of RadDataBars, the next step (obviously!) is to figure out how to customize these controls to better suit your business applications. See how you can control the axis display, add a data axis, control how the item label shows up in relation to the databar, and finally how you can control the colors being used for databars being drawn. (Download the project!)
• Integrating with RadGridView - In the last video for today, we'll showcase how you can get up and running with the three types of RadDataBars integrated into RadGridView. You'll learn how to template GridView column cells to display RadDataBars to create a better overall look at your data at a glance. (Download the project!)

As you can see, there are a lot of possibilities for what you can do with RadDataBars. And this is only one control from the RadControls for Silverlight and WPF, so be sure to tune in to the XAMLflix page to catch up on past and future episodes.

Stay tuned for more from XAMLflix!

@EvanHutnick

It's Monday and we've just finished with the Q1 2012 release - meaning it is time for Q1 2012 Webinar Week! We're excited to kick this week off with What's New in XAML 2012, but before you settle down for our metric ton of webinars, read on to see what XAMLflix has for you for our brand new RadGanttView CTP for the RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF! RadGanttView is used to display tasks and other time-based data in a readable and quickly digestable format, and even in the CPT version we've got a ton of great features to show off.

For a quick recap, XAMLflix = Videos + Projects covering all of the controls in both the RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF control suites. We are revamping the entire video library with fresh new content based on the latest and greatest versions of our controls, complete with projects so you can grab the same code you see in the video and run with it.

RadGanttView CTP - Already Awesome

Normally when dealing with CTP software you hold your breath and hope the build even runs - this isn't the case with RadGanttView. Our team has been hard at work taking in feedback for this new control and architecting a component that is not only easy to use but insane on performance. You can check this demo for an example of that performance in action. But we're not here to see just the demos, we're here to check out how to quickly and easily get started with this new CTP so you can plan on how you want to utilize it in your upcoming Silverlight and WPF projects.

• Getting Started with RadGanttView - In this video, we'll see what it takes to get started with RadGanttView. This includes both working with tasks and creating relations between tasks, along with exploring the VisualRange and PixelLength properties and how they influence how your data will display. (Download the project!)
• Highlighting with RadGanttView - After we've learned how to fire up RadGanttView, next up is showcasing some features! In this video we setup RadGanttView with the MVVM pattern, followed by hooking up a RadSlider for the PixelLength for a custom zoom experience, then finally hooking up a RadToggleButton and some highlighting logic to show off the Task Highlighting feature! (Download the project!)
• Custom GanttTask - In this video, we'll start with a quick review of RadGanttView in an MVVM scenario, then we'll create a custom GanttTask and utilize one of our custom properties to implement some business logic in a new Highlighting scenario. (Download the project!)

As you can see, there are a lot of possibilities for what you can do with RadGanttView. And this is only one control from the RadControls for Silverlight and WPF, so be sure to tune in to the XAMLflix page to catch up on past and future episodes, and don't forget that you can see RadGanttView and more in action during Q1 2012 Webinar Week this week, which appropriately enough begins with XAML. :)

Stay tuned for more from the XAMLflix marathon next week!

@EvanHutnick

Hello everyone,

I wanted to thank you all for attending the webinar today. As I promised in the webinar all of the materials are now available for you to download and explore on your own. If you have any questions then feel free to send me a tweet on twitter or leave a comment on here. I’d also suggest that you download the RadControls for Windows Phone 7 if you haven’t already.

Q1 2012 Windows Phone 7 Webinar Materials

Slides, Source Code and the Recorded Webinar Video

The Recorded Webinars

As always, all of our webinars are available for viewing on tv.telerik.com. So far, the following webinars are available to watch:

• What's New in Windows Phone 7
• What's New in XAML (Silverlight and WPF)
• What’s New in Test Studio
• What’s New in WinForms and Reporting
• What's New in ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET MVC
• What’s New in Just Products
• Overview video of What’s New in Q1 2012 (All Products)

Stay tuned for the KendoUI, SiteFinity and TeamPulse videos to be released or better yet attend the webinars live on 2/22/2012.

What did we cover today?

Some of the new controls/helpers covered in the Q1 2012 Windows Phone 7 presentation are:

• LiveTileHelper
• RadSlideView
• RadToolTip
• RadRating
• RadPaginationControl

We then introduced “Building Blocks of Metro Applications” which includes:

Trial Feature Reminder - The TrialFeatureReminder allows you to display reminder messages for the trial versions of your applications. You can track the usage of the different features and disable only some of them when the trial expires. Then you can display a nice message inviting your user to pay for the features in the marketplace.

Trial App Reminders - Very Similar to Feature Reminders in that the TrialApplicationReminder allows you to display reminder messages for the trial versions of your applications.   When the trial is expired you can display a nice message inviting your user to buy the application from the marketplace.

Rate Reminders - With this component you can add a very important feature for reminding your users to rate your application thus increasing your marketplace presence.

Error Diagnostics - With this component you can receive crash reports, add specific debug information and get run-time information from your users when an issue in your application is encountered.

Other Links Mentioned in the Talk

Using RadDiagnostics for WP7 to receive error reports anonymously.

Implementing Trial Functionality for Windows Phone applications.

Introducing RadDiagnostics for Windows Phone.

Introducing Rate Application Reminder for Windows Phone.

Announcing Application Building Blocks for Metro applications

Wrap-up

Thanks again for attending and don’t forget that we have several other great webinars lined up that you may be interested in such as KendoUI, SiteFinity 5 and TeamPulse.

Thanks for attending and enjoy the rest of Q1 2012 release webinar week!

@mbcrump

Along with the brand new goodies coming with the latest release of Telerik JustCode, i.e. support for QUnit and Jasmine JavaScript testing frameworks, opening the API to the public, All Types Code Completion (a.k.a. JustCode IntelliSense), etc., there comes a major overhaul of an old friend of ours – the Visual Aid, or lovingly shortened to VA. The main part of the rework there is in the direction of behavior configurability. Thus, a stand-alone VA settings page is brought to life in the Visual Features menu of JustCode options dialog.

The old settings are still there. "Show visual aid tag" option will show/hide the green gadget that visually indicates the current position of VA, and the slider will provide you with means of tuning the size of the header to your taste.

The twist here is centered around the newly introduced clear separation of the two modes VA works in.

Mouse Mode

Mouse mode means that VA is operated entirely by the movement of the mouse. This means that hovering with the mouse over VA will expand and switch its menus, leaving the menus will close VA, using the keyboard will have no effect on it and will return the focus to the code editor. There are some new settings to help you customize the behavior in this mode. The default values are shown in the screenshot above.

• Show header on mouse hover - Once unchecked, this option will disable showing the header and menus of VA using the mouse, and thus leaving only the Keyboard Mode as a means of displaying VA. The green VA tag is still there, though, so that you can easily see that there are some context actions at that point.
• Show menus on mouse hover - If unchecked, you won’t be able to display the menus under each header category using only mouse hover. You’ll have to click to open a menu there.
• Hide header on mouse leave - When this one is unchecked, the header will remain visible even when the mouse has left the VA menus. This proves helpful when you accidentally leave the area of VA, but still need to return to it right away.
• Enable keyboard mode on header mouse click - This option is essential for the interoperability of the two modes. If disabled, you won’t be able to activate keyboard mode using the mouse. Otherwise, a single click on any of the header categories will switch from Mouse to Keyboard Mode.

Keyboard Mode

This mode is designed especially for the geeks in us, who consider the mouse a “devil’s contraption”. In this mode you can perform the entire navigation within VA using exclusively the keyboard and you can do so even if the "Show visual aid tag" option is switched off. You can start by invoking VA with the shortcut Ctrl+`, then using the arrow keys to navigate through the header with categories and their menus (you can also use Tab and Shift+Tab to navigate the items in the menus), and invoke a command from a menu using the Enter key. Once you’re done browsing through VA you can use Esc to close it and return to the code editor.

• Switch menus on mouse hover - With this option set, you’ll be able to use both keyboard and mouse for navigating around the VA menus. The default is off as we want a clear separation of the two modes with the options’ initial values.

Feel free to experiment and share thoughts on how to improve the behavior of our Visual Aid so that it suits your coding habits best, and stay tuned with updates from Telerik on www.telerik.com.

Happy coding!
The JustCode team

With Q1 2012 release the highly anticipated Telerik Report Designer has arrived - a desktop application for creating reports, utilizing the power of Telerik Reporting.

The Telerik Report Designer features a simple ribbon interface and all the necessities for intuitive report creation like report items, wizards, explorers, all of them situated in a comfortable multi-document interface. This allows power users to create and edit ad-hoc reports on the fly. 

Creating a report is simple and the output is saved as XML report definition (.trdx or Telerik Report Definition XML) in a proprietary XML format, which can be shared with other users. Your existing reports (if saved as XML definitions) will work with the new ad-hoc report designer.

Appealing, interactive and sophisticated reports are created in a few simple steps. The Report Designer supports SQL Data Source and Cube Data Source. The Report, Table or Crosstab wizards guides you through the process of creating the reports. Their intuitive step by step instructions would get you going in no time as no previous experience is needed when using the wizards.

The Data Explorer and Report Explorer tools are used to quickly add, navigate and edit report items.

Modifying the existing items styles is facilitated by the Style Editor or the new user friendly Ribbon home tab:


The powerful expression engine is still easy to use with the Expression editor:

By using the Group Explorer and the Group Property window one can easily browse the existing groups of the report and quickly modify their properties, creating powerful and easily customizable layouts:

Printing and exporting reports from Telerik Report Designer are fully supported and you can easily acquire your digests, breakdowns, etc. in their preferred format, including Adobe PDF, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, XPS, TIFF and HTML. Also Interactive and Print preview are supported. Thus you can immediately preview the report, no matter of the used media.


Being in beta, there are some known issues we are working on to eliminate for the official release. We know that you are excited about this product, so your feedback is highly appreciated. We are open to hear out your first impressions and ideas for further improvement and development of Telerik Report Designer.

Known limitations:

• Events on report items are not supported
• Connecting to Object/OpenAccess/Entity Data Sources are not applicable

Currently we are working on:

• Enabling User functions and User aggregates
• Adding support for linked report to enable Subreports and Navigate to Report Action
• Using external StyleSheets from relative path -or- resource
• Open/edit reports from .NET CLR assemblies created in the Visual Studio Report Designer
• Windows Shell Integrations

System Requirements:

• .NET Framework 4.0 Full Profile (we require the "System.Design" assembly that is not included in the .NET Framework, Version=v4.0, Profile=Client)

In conclusion we can say that with the Report Designer and its variety of additional tools the report authoring is made extremely easy and user-friendly, providing the non-technical users with the ability to quickly create and distribute full-blown interactive reports.