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Telerik Offers Silverlight Advances and ORM for the Cloud
With its Q3 2009 release, Telerik is introducing Silverlight reporting tools and a complete object-relational mapper for SQL Azure, among other enhancements in its Premium Collection for .NET.
Released on Wednesday, Telerik’s latest .NET tooling offers updated RadControls for Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Presentation Foundation and WinForms; Reporting, OpenAccess ORM and beta extensions for ASP.NET MVC. Automated UI testing for Silverlight apps is now part of the WebUI Test Studio, a separate testing tool.
The updated Silverlight tooling, which supports Silverlight 3, offers a native report viewer for Telerik Reporting that renders pure XAML in a Silverlight plug-in. The upgraded Reporting tool supports Microsoft's XPS document format and document maps.
"Now I can put layers on top of Silverlight," said Todd Anglin, a Microsoft MVP and Telerik’s chief evangelist, "so for developers this is the first time that they have had a real reporting tool that allows them to take their reports, build them, deploy them to ASP.NET, WinForms and Silverlight."
Automated testing of Silverlight apps is supported in the enterprise-level WebUI Test Studio, designed by ArtofTest to automate integration testing of ASP.NET. With the framework's UI object model, developers can test and verify the Telerik UI elements of their Silverlight applications using a VS 2008 integrated test recorder.
The four extensions (in beta) for ASP.NET MVC, which include a data grid, are based on the JQuery JavaScript library and distributed under the open source GPLv2 license. A commercial license is also available.
The OpenAccess ORM tool, acquired when Telerik bought Vanetek of Germany in December 2008, now fully supports object-relational mapping for SQL Azure. At PDC09 later this month, Microsoft is launching the Windows Azure Platform, which includes the relational database in the cloud. Developers can use the ORM tool to map directly against SQL Azure.
"What that means is people can use our ORM tool just as if they were working with SQL Server today locally in their office," explained Anglin. "They can forward map, reverse map and--as they say in the Entity Framework language--use the Model First, Schema First approach to developing databases."
OpenAccess ORM supports .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 and requires Telerik's VS 2008 wizards. Telerik is also launching interactive tutorials and online demos in conjunction with the support for SQL Azure.
The company will continue to look at different approaches to help developers move data in and out of their applications more easily in the cloud and platforms such as Silverlight, according to Anglin. "OpenAccess is the foundation for that," he said.
OpenAccess ORM with support for SQL Azure is part of Telerik's Premium Collection for .NET Q3 2009 release. The entire collection is available now for $1,299 per developer seat. The products are also sold separately.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.