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Telerik Goes Live with Next-Gen Web Controls
Telerik announces "Prometheus," the newest version of its RadControls suite for .NET FX 3.5, to be released in 2008.
Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX extensions will become part of ASP.NET 2.0 in .NET 3.5, expected to ship in the same timeframe as Visual Studio "Orcas."
First-to-market components house Telerik is already at work on a new version of its RadControls suite for .NET FX 3.5, code-named "Prometheus." (Developers up on their Greek mythology will recognize Prometheus as the brother of "Atlas," code-name of ASP.NET AJAX.)
"We're planning to release Prometheus in 2008; if Orcas is late, we won't wait," says Svetozar Georgiev, co-CEO of Telerik, a company whose development team is housed at its headquarters in Bulgaria. Georgiev expects the rebuilt RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX to ship around the Orcas launch, or if Microsoft slips, by April 2008.
Completely Integrated
Telerik's current suite, RadControls for ASP.NET, supports ASP.NET AJAX, but it's based on a proprietary framework. There's a lot of benefit to developers and end users in retooling the controls so they're based on a common programming model and completely integrated with the new framework, asserts Todd Anglin, technical evangelist at Telerik. "What it enables us to provide to developers is a framework that utilizes what will already be in their toolbox with .NET 3.5 -- the ASP.NET AJAX code and client libraries," he says.
Web site users also stand to benefit from apps built with the new framework and tooling. "End users have to download significantly fewer files when they access a site," observes Anglin. "When their browser does all this caching and stuff, it'll in general significantly speed up the experience of browsing AJAX Web sites."
RadControls Prometheus is still in the early stages, although it's available in beta. The Q1 beta includes six controls: RadAjax, RadDock, RadSplitter, RadToolTip, RadSlider and RadColorPicker. Version 1 of the suite will provide all of the existing 18 UI and data RadControls, along with any new controls such as the RadScheduler control slated for release this month. Developers can also take advantage of the pre-built controls in Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX controls toolkit.
Past and Future
The Prometheus controls won't all be backward-compatible, due to the new UI framework. Current users of RadControls for ASP.NET (.NET 2.0) can mix their existing controls, however, with ASP.NET AJAX-based Prometheus controls on the same page.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.