See what productivity tools many .NET developers overlook and learn why and when they are useful. How do we know these tools are overlooked? We drew insights from our .NET developer survey, and so can you.

When it comes to productivity the mantra is that it saves time, and time is money they say. But how does one get more productive in their daily routine?

Our recent survey of over 1,000 .NET developers unveiled some surprisingly overlooked productivity tools. In this article, I’ll walk you through them and explain why and when you might want to use them. If you’re looking for some low hanging productivity fruit, read on.

CSS vs Sass/LESS

Using CSS extensions is nothing new, but it is amazing how many people still write CSS the old way. So what does Sass (or LESS) give you? It gives you the possibility to create primitives and abstractions to be later reused in your code. It is the way to implement DRY in your CSS. For example, you can create a set of primitives for your most used visual elements and simply reference them later.

We use Sass and LESS in our everyday routine to achieve a CSS that is more maintainable and easy to understand and write. There are many getting started articles and we really suggest that you take a look if you haven’t already.

Learn more in the CSS Preprocessing with Visual Studio article from my colleague Ed Charbeneau.

Lightweight Code Editing

Many of us use Visual Studio on a daily basis. But have you noticed how slow it is? How about if you simply need to edit vanilla HTML/JavaScript files? You don’t really need the heavy infrastructure that comes with VS to do that. What we do instead in our daily routine is use a more lightweight code editor like Visual Studio Code (which is free!) to make these edits. 

Visual Studio Code is based on the trendy Electron platform and can run cross-platform. It is very fast and, by the way, has integrated support for node.js debugging. Cool?

Learn more in the 10 Awesome Features of Visual Studio Code article from my colleague Sam Basu.

Command Line Tooling

For a long time command line tooling was a somewhat forgotten concept in the GUI Windows world. For this reason many people have forgotten or do not know that it can actually save a lot of time to do text manipulation with command line tools rather than GUI editors.

On the Telerik team our work environment is mostly Windows, but we use Git Bash Shell to execute Unix style tools. It is far beyond this article to get into details on those tools (for example grep, find, sed), but I highly recommend that you take the time and learn them. The power to perform complex text manipulations from a terminal window is a special skill that can save tons of time once mastered.

Build Tools

The use of build tools, and more specifically Gulp, is a hot topic lately. Even Microsoft chose Gulp as the build tool for the ASP.NET Core platform. So what does Gulp give you that, let’s say, MsBuild does not? Well, have you ever tried to debug an MsBuild task? Not the easiest thing to accomplish!

The biggest problem with MsBuild, in my opinion, is that it's XML based. This leads to a long and tedious process to read declarative scripts. There isn’t an easy way to debug the tasks that you invoke.

Compare this with the way Gulp allows you to write build files. Simple JavaScript and APIs that everyone who knows JavaScript can use with ease. The script files are a valid JavaScript files and you can reuse knowledge. Debugging is also much easier.

A possible downside is that it requires you to have node.js installed in your ecosystem. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, because it gives you exposure to the large set of tools available in the node.js ecosystem.

A Personal Favorite: Clipboard Manager

This is a very important tool that many people are not aware of. So what does the clipboard manager do? Basically it “remembers” everything you have copied and pasted. Ever. And you can search the list in an autocomplete way. What are the uses? I find it invaluable when trying to quickly find email addresses, URLs, code snippets and much more. We use ditto (a freeware tool), but there are alternatives available for every taste.

In my opinion it’s the use of such productivity techniques that makes a good developer really good. At the end of the day what matters is how quickly you can finish up your work and how much time is left for the other things in life.  

Other Resources You Might Like:

• 2016 .NET Community Report [Survey Report]
• Is Sass Right for Your CSS? [Podcast] 
• ASP.NET Core MVC Changes Every Developer Should Know [Whitepaper]
• Choosing the Right Tech Stack for Your ASP.NET App [Webinar]

What’s your background, professionally?

Well this is going to give away my age, but I started studying Software Engineering back in the days of Turbo Pascal and Eiffel, then moved over to Information Technology, bridging the gap between business and technology. I have been consulting on this for the last ten years or so.

During that period, I started to specialize in web projects, predominantly using Sitefinity. I’ve had the privilege of doing this on projects in Europe, the US, Australia, Asia, Africa and Middle East.

Where are you based and why?

I recently moved from Dubai, where I worked for several years for a digital agency to take on a position with Sogeti/Cap Gemini in Switzerland. My time in Dubai was amazing. It is a vibrant work environment with a unique if-we-can-dream-it-we-can-build-it mentality. While I tremendously enjoyed working for clients like the Dubai stock exchange and Dubai Airports, when I was asked to come to Switzerland, it was the right opportunity at the right time.

As part of my new role, I’ll not only be focusing on client architectures or development but once again will be able to advocate and not only build out an internal Sitefinity team but also become a visible local and digital community member again. This is something I truly missed doing while in Dubai.

With whom are you working?

I joined Sogeti as part of the Digital & Mobile practice. This is a pillar within the organization focusing on Digital Strategy, Innovation Portfolio Management, Architecture, UX/UI, Testing, Web and Mobile. A mouthful, I know, but it means that all of my direct colleagues here in Lausanne and Geneva and my colleagues in Spain, UK and Netherlands I’ve interacted with so far, have similar backgrounds and mindsets and a shared motivation to deliver beyond client expectations.

I know this sounds like a lot of marketing talk...until you see teams organically form and dissolve to tackle a client’s architecture or discuss development best-practices. It truly is an inspiring collaborative environment here.

What project are you working on now?

Currently I’m involved with a multi-market migration project that spans the globe west-to-east, devising a product solution that has me so psyched it keeps me up at night. I'll be setting up the internal ALM and best-practices when it comes to Sitefinity development.

Aside from that, in my spare time, I’m currently working on one of my pet-peeves which is new project feather package that takes the default Bootstrap implementation to the next level. This is similar to what I’ve done for Sitefinity Web forms back in the day, but taking it farther—not just from a performance perspective but a current best-practices angle as well.

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

That would be one for a telco operator, where I had the opportunity to help shape the roadmap and kick off the architecture and implementation for their ecommerce integration onto their Sitefinity based digital presence.  It was a lengthy process of talking and drawing before it moved to the development stage, but we’ve recently had the first product roll-out on this new implementation and it’s been the most successful product launch in the company’s history.

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

Believe it or not, but my biggest challenge so far has been my Swiss keyboard! 
Switching from QWERTY to QWERTZ is one thing—but they shouldn’t have moved a developer’s punctuation marks around.

Globalization is another struggling point, not specific here at work but in general terms of software development (I discuss this more below).

In terms of development, I find myself constantly validating the latest shift in development with package-management. I’m a little OCD when it comes to structure and organization, but nonetheless quickly got on board with the NuGet approach.

I do worry that the latest build flow with NPM and its single-purpose-package-chain approach will flood my workspaces with 3^rd party source, test code and document instead of managed packages. Let's not even mention the latest NPM gaffe! I’m wondering if we’re not simply going through another jquery-plugin phase where we trade knowledge for laziness and shiny looking command prompts.

What Telerik products do you use and why?

Sitefinity CMS and Kendo naturally, they’ve been in my toolbox for years and I think I also couldn’t live without the tools like Fiddler, JustCode, JustDecompile and TestStudio. Simply because they’re the best—both in ease-of-use as in the functionality they offer. Telerik Reporting is a great product but I don’t get to use it a lot unfortunately.

With too little time on my hand, I’ve only dabbled and played around with UI for Xamarin & UWP but it’s on this year’s to-do list, together with becoming more proficient with the Telerik Platform.

Sitefinity to-date still remains my most advocated and loved CMS and for the past years it has been the pivot point around which I extended my knowledge and expertise. With its recent transition into the enterprise and Digital Marketing realm, it will stay this way for years to come.

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

If I had to give some general keywords it would be: communication, evolution over revolution and globalization.

As developers we still seem to be unable to communicate properly towards our clients about the complexity and all the variables that come into play these days when building a new product or service. On one hand we shouldn’t have to educate our clients, but the reality teaches us often otherwise.

We also have a problem iterating by means of evolution, rather than revolution. We’re increasingly delivering products as services (continuous updating products) which is a model—to a certain extent—to which we’re not proficient yet as an industry. We’re pushing ourselves into a 24/7 fluent delivery model while users still expect us to deliver a product.

Over the years I’ve seen some industry shifts where we as an industry shift our technological foundation and they’ve mostly worked out for the better, however software has become a fundamental cornerstone of our lives and economies and revolutions shouldn’t be encouraged so callously anymore. Yet we keep re-inventing wheels and ways to out-do the competition—I know it’s part of our DNA as developers, but we should also develop a consciousness that forces us to address fundamentals instead of merely reaching for new shiny niches. How can we introduce and embrace new concepts, frameworks and methodologies like SPAs, NodeJS and NPM while it takes us over six years as an industry to standardize and perfect something like responsive design—something every user is struggling with day in day out.

Which brings me to my personal biggest pain point—globalization and identity management. We, as developers, can’t seem to handle it and with the ever decreasing line between work and personal it is becoming harder and harder to manage. During my transition from Dubai to Switzerland, I found myself temporarily using two phones and a few weeks later I realized that I’m struggling to merge everything into one again or even on my Surface. We have too many identities, untransferable data, and software simply doesn't understand or accept out-of-country information.

The .NET framework has had quite the journey from conception until today. Yet, every iteration from .NET 1.0 to .NET 4.5 has almost invariably required kittens to die, as you painstakingly upgraded your apps and the .NET runtimes. The challenge, in part, was because of the giant monolithic .NET framework that all your apps depended on.

All that changes moving forward.

The new .NET framework is modern, lean, modular and open source. No longer is .NET a system-wide installation—it is merely a folder. Instead of a huge underlying framework, you only pick and choose the pieces of the .NET framework that you need in your apps. And more importantly, you can package the required components of the .NET framework right alongside your app. We’re entering an age of app-runtime silos and ultimate portability.

Not surprisingly, ASP.NET 5 is driving many of the changes in .NET, as shown in the 10,000-foot view below. ASP.NET 4.6 is the next full iteration of ASP.NET and it runs on the full API canvas of .NET 4.6—everything you do now in .NET runs just fine in this mode going forward. The new kids on the block are ASP.NET 5 and .NET Core 5 – both of them lean, modular, cross-platform and open source.

With ASP.NET 5, you could build your web app on one machine with a specific version of .NET runtime, and seamlessly move and run the app on another machine, with no installation required. This is possible not just between Windows machines, but even cross-platform across OSX or Linux. Portability of .NET—yes please!

Telerik UI

Want to spice up the UI for your MVC web apps? With Telerik® UI for ASP.NET MVC suite, you get 70+ polished and performant UI components powered by Kendo UI. You get server-side wrappers that emit clean HTML5/JS code on the client side, as well framework pieces and deep Visual Studio integration.

With ASP.NET 5 around the corner, you may be wondering how your beloved Telerik MVC UI suite will fare. Turns out, UI for ASP.NET MVC is as bleeding edge as you are. Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC suite already supports ASP.NET 5 RC1 release—the latest and greatest. This means you can leverage Visual Studio 2015 and the latest features of MVC 6 while utilizing Telerik UI for your next amazing web app.

How do you get started? Grab the latest Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 bits from the updated NuGet feed. Check your Visual Studio References folder to ensure that you are correctly using the Telerik MVC bits inside your existing MVC web project. With the bits ready, it’s time to have fun.

Going Cross-Platform

With ASP.NET 5 you have ultimate portability, and now you can use your favorite Telerik MVC UI controls for cross-platform apps! How? Simple—Telerik MVC apps can now run on top of the new .NET Core, and therefore are super portable.

Want to see Telerik UI going cross-platform in action? We have a sample app ready for you. Head out to the GitHub repo for the sample cross-platform app.

Here are the steps to run the app on a Mac:

1. Download the source code as a zipped file.
2. Unpack and take a look around.
3. Notice the Index.shtml view—it is rendering UI through the @HTML server-side Kendo helpers, just as would normally do in your MVC project. You’ll find the usual Grid, Menu, Buttons and more.
4. Make sure you have the right DNX version runtime. This particular app depends on the 1.0.0-rc1-update1 CoreCLR runtime; feel free to use ‘DNVM Use’ command to set the right DNX version, as below.
5. Run ‘DNU Restore’ to pull down and restore all NuGet packages.
6. Run ‘DNX Web’ to launch the entry point.
7. Launch browser and navigate to http://localhost:5004.

A native ASP.NET MVC app with Telerik UI controls—now running on a Mac. How cool is that! And you can not only run the app on OSX or Linux, but also do future development on these other platforms. How can you set up cross-platform support from the very start for your MVC projects? Simple—just meet the requirements and follow the steps below.

Here are the steps to run Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC cross-platform from scratch:

1. Start an ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio
2. Make sure you have the latest Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC bits, with support for ASP.NET 5 RC1
3. Utilize the Telerik MVC controls to build your desired UI
4. Set target framework to .NET Core. This can be done in VS Project Properties or through Project.JSON file by setting supported frameworks to ‘DNXCore50’
5. Move entire directory to OSX or Linux and run ‘DNU Restore’
6. To simply run the app locally on other platforms, package up the app using ‘DNU Publish’

You may call this an effort to democratize .NET and ASP.NET for every type of developer. Gone are the days of a high barrier to entry, massive installations and IDE lock-ins—you should be able to use ASP.NET 5 on any platform and using the editor of your choice. And Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC is right there to help spice up your app’s UI. Have fun!

Whether you have already drawn insights from our (free) 2016 .NET Developer Community Report or not, you will likely find this new slice of the results delicious. This infographic presents a few interesting cross-sections of data from our 2016 .NET Developer Survey, some of which are not included in the report.

Conducted in January/February 2016, the survey reached more than 1,000 .NET developers. It covers topics ranging from technology adoption to favorite tools and learning habits. To see the full picture, download our survey report and enjoy the insightful commentary of our developer advocates John Bristowe, Sam Basu and Ed Charbeneau. You can also read our previousposts covering the survey.

For more info, check out the additional resources below. If you enjoyed this and found it useful, please share the 2016 .NET Developer Community Report infographic. 

Related Resources: 

• Modern Tech Stack for ASP.NET Apps [article]
• Leveling Up Your JavaScript [article]
• The Future of JavaScript: 2016 and Beyond [whitepaper]
• Three D’s of Web Development #1: Declarative vs. Imperative [article]

In our latest Kendo UI webinar, developer advocates Cody Lindley, Todd Motto and Burke Holland walk you through saving content to various formats from webpages.

Last week we held a Kendo UI webinar about exporting and saving content from the DOM/Kendo UI widgets to the client's local machine in the form of text, images, SVG, PDF and Excel documents. The webinar is now up on youtube (as well as below) and you can watch it again, for the first time or as many times as you like.

If you want to immediately dig into some code examples, we've placed the code shown in the webinar into a GitHub repository for you.

Overview of the Webinar

Open-Source Exporting Solutions

I kick off the webinar by demoing three examples that make use of open-source solutions for exporting content from the DOM:

• Export text: text.html or https://jsbin.com/tonire/edit?js,output
• Export image: image.html or https://jsbin.com/segaxi/edit?js,output
• Export pdf: pdf.html or https://jsbin.com/nixefu/edit?js,output

Accomplish More with Kendo UI

Then Todd Motto showed off how simple it was to accomplish the same thing and more using Kendo UI. In short, Todd covered the following topics:

• Demoed the public Kendo UI APIs that allow for low level saving and exporting of base 64 content, which we could create ourselves as a String and pass off to the Kendo UI API
• Demoed the higher level APIs from the Kendo UI toolset, to look at how we can export raw HTML directly as PDF, SVG and Images using the kendo.drawing API
• Demoed how to configure widgets to automatically show us export toolbars for simplicity, and control how we export data with filenames, margins (for PDF).
• Demoed a brief overview of some other widgets that use the export APIs.

A Look at Server-Side Rendering of Documents

Finally Burke finished off the webinar with a brief look at server-side rendering of documents.

He showed the Document Processing Libraries (DPL) that are part of the Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX suite, and are now available for all Telerik UI For ASP.NET MVC customers.

Those libraries allow rich interaction with a variety of document formats, including CSV, Excel and PDF. The libraries can be used to read from and write to document formats, as well as serializing the documents for consumption by Kendo UI widgets, which expect the data in a certain JSON format. The DPL libraries that we provide make working with documents on the server a breeze. No need to include those Office COM components. The Telerik DPL has you covered.

You can check out some of the UI for ASP.NET Demos available with full samples of code for working with the Telerik DPL.

Finally, after all that we ended the webinar with some Q&A from the audience.

What do you think? Do you have any questions about anything we covered, or anything we missed? Let us know your thoughts on the webinar in the comments.

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.

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.

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.

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?
Your project is automatically backed up during the conversion process. However, we strongly recommend using a source control system.

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.

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]

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!

In this screencast, Cody Lindley walks you through a quick and easy way to set up Kendo UI for a React development environment using nwb.

One Way: Avoiding a CLI Tool for Transparancy

I recently wrote an article, "Taming the React Setup," which details seven development setups that will get you going with React development. The last two setups in the article detail how to use SystemJS/jspm.io and Webpack with React to create a minimal application development setup. These examples also showcase the up and coming Kendo UI for React components. I purposely made these two setups minimal and transparent in terms of tools used. In other words, I avoided using a CLI tool to scaffold a development environment so as not to conceal the details of the setups. I did this not because you shouldn't use a black boxish scaffolding tool (use them if you know what they do in detail), but so that anyone new to React development could get a clear view of the tools used to set up a React app.

Using a Scaffolding Tool to Develop Quickly and Simply

After writing the article I realized that it might be nice to get going with Kendo UI for React as fast as possible in the context of a web application, at the cost of tool transparency. By using a React scaffolding CLI tool, setting up Kendo UI React components for use in a React app can happen quickly and simply without needing to understanding the underlying app tools (i.e. Webpack, hot reloading, Webpack plugins, Babel, configuration files etc...).

However, be aware that at some point you'll be forced to gain a deeper understanding of the tools that are being scaffolded. Mostly because the scaffolding itself has to be configured, and that will require knowledge of the underlying tools. But, for now, lets proceed as if ignorance was bliss and/or scaffolding is king. (To be clear I'm not knocking ignorance, bliss, or scaffolding. Each has a place and a time. And often at the same time.)

So, we don't want the overhead of the setup to stop you from using or previewing Kendo UI for React.

Start Using Kendo UI React Components Quickly with nwb

The React nwb CLI tool makes it possible to sidestep the overhead of setting up a React application. Thus it is the perfect solution to preview or get up and running fast with Kendo UI for React. The React nwb CLI tool is also a great solution if you already understand all of the setups tools. By using it you can automate/expedite the process of setting up a React application.

In the following video I am going to walk you through how to use nwb so you can start using Kendo UI React components almost immediately.

Telerik Analytics provides powerful tools to help you make data-driven decisions to improve and grow your product. Learn how we used analytics to improve our own software, Test Studio.

My eminent colleague, Ruslan Mursalzade, blogged about how Schneider Electric used Product Usage insights provided by Telerik Analytics to determine the value of each feature, and decide on the screen real estate that each UI feature would receive.

However, I also became aware of some powerful stories in our own company as to how we use Analytics internally to groom other products, like Test Studio. We have a culture of eating our own dog food here, so we can deliver an excellent user experience to our customers. I’m excited to share this validation with you.

Having the Conversation

I talked to Iliyan Panchev, the product manager of Test Studio, our product for automating the testing of web, desktop or mobile apps. It provides point-and-click recording, programming flexibility (API testing tool coming in June 2016) and a lot of productivity boosting features on top of that. I want to share what I learned, and we’ll look at four key areas.

Key Product Learnings

1. Product Support Decisions

Part of successful product management is making tricky decisions about supporting older technologies. The product team must balance resources to provide the right mix of features and support. The Test Studio team must always be careful to continue support for popular and critical features so that customers will receive the high value and quality they expect.

When the team considered ending support for XP, Vista, Visual Studio 2008, IE 7, etc., analytics played a huge role in validating that decision. The “Environments” metric was key. With environmental usage data, the product team could make data based decisions on when and how to end support for particular technologies.

Improving the Product

While evolving the product, the product team wanted to measure the performance of Test Studio and make improvements. Through the use of Telerik Analytics, the QA team collected real-time feature usage trends like average project size, average test step count, min/max test, step counts. Then, the QA team used these metrics to create test cases matching the customer experience and usage of the product. Thanks to these insights, performance testing was accurate. On top of that, the improvements also struck a chord with the customers and their real-life projects.

Better Product Stability via Crash Tracking

The aggregate dashboard in Telerik Analytics gave the team a bird's eye view of the exceptions and crashes that were happening on an ongoing basis. Aggregate visualization helped the team prioritize fixes for issues. Taking action on them helped a lot in product stability and improving user experience.

Tracking Adoption of New Releases

Telerik Analytics provides the reporting capability to track the uptake of new releases. After each release, the Product team was able to measure upgrade rates though the adoption charts. This information, displayed in an easy to digest fashion, helped the product team fine-tune the product strategy and collaborate closer with other teams to mean adoption goals.

Imagine Growing Your Product with Telerik Analytics

As a Product Manager, imagine yourself being in Iliyan’s shoes and driving the growth of your own desktop, web or mobile product with the help of Telerik Analytics. Having easily accessible real-time metrics about adoption, feature performance, usage and other data points would give you the sound footing you need to make quality decisions about your product.

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 requesting an analytics trial experience for desktop, web or mobile apps by requesting a trial of Telerik Platform for the Enterprise Plan..

As the official ASP.NET Core 1.0 RTM grows closer, we continue to improve our support for Microsoft's newest features in our UI for ASP.NET MVC.

I'm eager to share that UI for ASP.NET MVC R2 2016 SP1 is out and features not only bug fixes and improvements, but also highly demanded support for ASP.NETCore 1.0RC2.

ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 Compliance and Benefits

• Cross-platform web application development for Windows, Mac and Linux OS
• The Tag Helpers are quite similar to the HTML tags, which however are processed by Razor on the server.
• Nuget, Bower and Gulp package managers and automation tools boost your productivity

In our UI for ASP.NET MVC suite, the components and Tag Helpers are tested against ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 and fully satisfy its requirements. This allows you to use them and create web apps with beautiful UI, as well as rich and useful functionality that run on any of the three supported platforms: Mac, Linux and Windows.

Our UI for ASP.NET MVC suite, its components and Tag Helpers are tested against ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 and fully satisfy its requirements. This allows you to use them and create web apps with beautiful UI, rich ans useful functionality that run on any of the supported three platforms: Mac, Linux and Windows.

Download, Install and More

You can download the latest UI for ASP.NET MVC (full name: Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 RC2 Final 2016.2.607) from the up-to-date NuGet feed. Along with the download links, you'll find on the page installation instructions. You can also check our official ASP.NET Core (MVC6) page and this blog post for more details. More info about ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 is available in the Scott Hanselman's blog post here.

Fresh News and Roadmap Plans

We continue to follow the progress towards the official version of ASP.NET
Core 1.0 RTM closely. It's expected on June 27, and shortly we are going to release a special Service Pack version of our components and Tag Helpers dedicated to it.

We are also ready with the Roadmap for R3 2016, so soon we are going to blog about the new highly anticipated features and controls that you've requested and expect. The MVC Roadmap page will be updated accordingly.

Other UI for ASP.NET MVC Suite Updates

If you are curious to learn more about the other stuff in the service pack, check out the release notes. Of course, the live demos are up-to-date and you can always give them a spin.

Got Feedback?

If you have questions, feedback or experience trouble regarding ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 support, you can search for a solution or ask for help in the following trendy GitHub issue: Support for ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2. You can also leave a comment below or the use the ticketing system on our support pages.

Happy Coding!

The first service pack of the R2 2016 release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX is out. Go ahead and grab it to make your web apps more stable.

The latest stability release of UI for ASP.NET AJAX R2 2016 SP1 (2016.2.607) is out and brings with it a lot of improvements. You can find below a short list that highlights some of the most valuable problems we have updated and enhanced with this release:

• Close the predefined RadAlert, RadConfirm and RadPrompt popups with the Escape key
• Cells on the last row in RadGrid cannot be selected using DragToSelect cells, if cursor runs out of the grid during the selection
• Using RadEditor's ToolsFile property from the markup disregards Lightweight rendering configured from the web.config
• RadEditor's TrackChanges does not track typing of !, #, $, %, & characters
• Title of decorated checkboxes by RadFormDecorator is lost in FireFox and IE

You can quickly go through the complete list of fixes in the Release Notes.

Stability Trends

We do understand how stability impacts your development and we always strive to significantly reduce bugs, to avoid regressions and breaking changes. That's why I want to share with you the bug reduction progress from 2015 to now for three of the most popular components in the following chart:

Important Resources

You can download the latest trial build here, as well as play with the Live Demos and read the Documentation.

Upgrading Instructions

The blog post, Upgrade Your Telerik ASP.NET Controls in 6 Easy Steps, will guide you through the update process and help you troubleshoot any problems that pop up.

Roadmap Plans

I also want to inform you that the Product Roadmap for R3'16 is ready. We're about to update the Roadmap page and will post a blog on the topic pretty soon. Stay tuned!

Share Your Thoughts?

In this service release we have focused our efforts mostly on improving the product stability. A full list of the changes can be found in our release notes.

Section Columns in RadRichTextEditor

In addition, we have added a really useful feature to RadRichTextEditor, which allows separating the text in a section in multiple columns.

Anouncement: RadRichTextBox Will Be Removed in R3 2016

If you are still using RadRichTextBox, I would like to once again remind you to switch to the improved editor control—RadRichTextEditor, as RadRichTextBox will be removed from our code base soon.

The latest bits of Telerik UI for WinForms are already available in your account. If you don’t have one, you can try it out with a free trial.

As always, feel free to use our Feedback portal to share your ideas and/or vote for existing ones.

There are several foundational steps that organizations should consider as they embark on a journey to achieve digital excellence and mature into modern Enterprises.

If you’re in business today, you know that technology is changing everything, from the way enterprises do business to the way information is consumed and disseminated. Cloud computing, mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT) are among the transformative technologies that have set the stage of innovation. There is hardly any organization that is not working to adapt in the hopes of thriving within this fluctuating, digital dynamic.

We all have the right aspirations—to best leverage systems, tools and processes to gain efficiency, to manage cost savings and establish a competitive advantage in the marketplace. But how do we do it? What gives us better chances of success?

As your organization embarks on its digital evolution, here are several tips to keep in mind that we have seen in the more successful organizations we have the privilege to work with:

1. Understand Your Objectives (the End Goal)

   One of the biggest mistakes you can make is in the very beginning—not setting clear objectives for your Digital Transformation projects. When you don’t spend enough time understanding your objectives and mapping them out to the “three pillars” (revenue, cost or risk/compliance) you quickly go to tactics which don’t really answer the key question—how do those DT efforts create tangible, measurable value for the organization?

   Typically, the questions that are being brought up are along the lines of: Are you trying to update an existing application or build a new one? Does your organization need an app development platform or tool? How robust are your data needs, really? Are you deploying on-premises or in the cloud?

   The better question is—how will this have the right impact on our business? Can we trace it back to the business outcomes, or is it just a lot of tasks that you will do without creating an outcome for your business?

2. Look at the Effort Holistically

   Everything has to align—strategy, people, process, technology, implementation. Do you have the right people to execute on your Digital Strategy? What’s the technology gap between what you have and where you want to be? What will be the impact on process? Are all functions in your organization aligned? Supportive?

   Organizations tend to approach the effort in a siloed way, but that never leads to great results. Transformation is a collaborative process and all functions need to come together. Otherwise it will not deliver a transformative result. It will be a set of tactical initiatives that create a marginal result. Not that tactical initiatives don’t matter, but you can do so much more if you challenge yourself outside of your comfort zone. The companies of tomorrow need to be collaborative and bring functions together.

3. Mind the… Cultural Gap

   How are you going to bring people over?

   What is the impact on culture? Why are all those changes good for them? Explain why they should care and why they should support you, provide feedback, etc. Many times this step is skipped, and this leads to a lot of frustration for key stakeholders as they don’t see the value or it’s not aligned with their objectives.

4. Be Ready for Change

   New systems and technology do not lead to new results if there is no change in behavior. Be ready to change. You need to change the way you operate in order to be successful. Many organizations try to change in an ad-hoc way. And it doesn’t work. Because people continue to do things the same way. Only new behaviors will create new results. You also need a structured approach to build the bridge between today and tomorrow and take people over.

   You need to embed a digital-first mentality in everyone in the organization! People need to believe. They need to feel it.

   Building muscle always comes with pain. But if you don’t force yourself to build muscle, you will not be able to be a top athlete. Don’t settle for mediocrity and irrelevance just because it’s hard.

   Force people to understand that change starts with them. Many times the biggest challenge is that everyone is “All-In” for change but believes that everyone else but them needs to change and the world has to adapt to them. It’s critical to fix such behavior and thinking early on in the project and to force all participants to be self-aware and willing to change.

5. Remember: Digital Growth Is a Journey, Not a Destination

   Be patient and persistent. Be persistent about reaching your goal but be patient. You cannot transform overnight. There will be bumps. Even if you really want to run, you first have to learn to crawl and crawl before that. Focus your efforts not on how imperfect you are but did you give your best today to move the agenda for the company.

6. Lastly… Find the Right Partner and Technology Solution

Most organizations do this in reverse but don’t fall into that trap.

Unfortunately, no technology offers a panacea. Just as a word processor does not make you a Nobel Prize novelist, no shiny new technology solution will miraculously transform you into a better organization. Take it slow—understand your challenges first, define the Goals and Objectives, the Principles that will guide you, and then select a path.

Remember, Digital Transformation is not about implementing new technology, it’s not about keeping busy. It’s about leveraging technology to drive new behaviors which will unleash new unseen powers in your organization. New ways to bring people together and leverage their collective talent (de-silo the organization) New ways to stay close to customers and partners (open up).

Enjoy the Digital Transformation Journey!

Official ASP.NET Core 1.0 Support, new components, styles and much more are on the way in our UI for ASP.NET MVC roadmap for R3 2016.

The world is changing, and as pioneers we closely follow the modern trends in web development. The goal is clear, and it is to be among the first vendors to offer:

Official ASP.NET Core 1.0 (MVC) Support

Since the release date for ASP.NET Core 1.0.0 is rapidly approaching at the end of the month (Jun 27), we are working hard to introduce full support for it shortly after it launches. This means that all available widgets will work properly on the new framework along with the recently introduced Tag Helpers.

You can follow the progress of ASP.NET Core 1.0 development here. Right now our MVC suite provides support for the second release candidate of ASP.NET Core 1.0, and we'll ensure that it is fully compatible with the RTM release.

What More to Expect in R3'16

New Confirm, Prompt and Alert Component

The new popups will allow you to achieve a sleek and consistent look and feel across browsers and devices. You'll be able to customize their appearance to match your application's appearance, and easily transfer content between the page and the dialog's content.

New Media Player Component

The media component will be capable of playing files of any HTML5-supported audio and video format, including WebM, Ogg, MP4 and WAVE. It will also support YouTube videos.

AutoComplete, ComboBox, DropDownList and MultiSelect Improvements

Some great improvements will be introduced to the dropdown widgets:

• The components will feature a clear "X" button similar to the one offered by <input type="search" />
• Footer and "No data" templates
• “AutoWidth” configuration option similar to what the RadCombobox for ASP.NET AJAX exposes

Grid

Thanks to the out-of-the box integration with the RadSpreadProcessing library, the grid is going to offer export to CSV/XLSX formats.

Editor

Our goal is to significantly improve the HTML editor and make it as useful as its AJAX counterpart RadEditor. Among the nice additions which you can expect are:

• Immutable containers that will allow you to define non editable areas in the content area. This is especially useful in CMS systems where you might want to insert embedded Twitter messages.
• Server-side import from RTF and DOCX—this is highly demanded feature by the community
• Server-side export to RTF, DOCX and PDF—again highly anticipated functionality, which is a must have for an HTML editor. The Editor widget already offers powerful, client-side export to PDF, which you can test here.
• Table Wizard along with table, column and row resizing—great functionality for table management that will enable the end users to easier deal with table elements in the content area

Gantt

More control is granted to the developers to precisely enable or disable editing options like: create, update (reorder, resize, move, editors), destroy, move, resize, reorder, dependencyCreate and dependencyDestroy. You'll also benefit from the ability to specify a range or selected date in the Timeline view.

Scheduler

The scheduling component will allow you to group its appointments by Date and Resource.

Spreadsheet

Expect new improved layout and styling of the validation dialog. You can see the new enhanced design and UX here. In addition, the spreadsheet will introduce support for custom editors as well as user-defined names.

Have Feedback?

You just learned about the planned highlights for the R3 release. If you have comments, suggestions or feature requests, the right places to share them are the comments section below and the Feedback portal. Your feedback is always highly appreciated!