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Telerik Ships Q2 2012 Dev Tools, Previews Metro Toolkit

The beta of the Metro tooling, which supports Windows 8 development for the desktop and tablets, is expected sometime this summer.

• By Kathleen Richards
• 06/15/2012

Telerik released its Q2 2012 developer tools this week and previewed a RadControls for Metro toolkit. The beta of the Metro tooling, which supports Windows 8 development for the desktop and tablets, is expected sometime this summer.

Developers can register for Telerik's Windows 8 Dev Club to gain early access to the Metro preview, according to the company. Telerik showcased the RadControls for Metro toolkit at the Microsoft TechEd event, held June 11-14, in Orlando, Florida.

Microsoft has taken a radically different approach with developer guidelines for the Metro UI, according to Chris Sells, the vice president of Telerik's Developer Tools division. Sells was formerly a Microsoft product manager in charge of Metro templates inside of Visual Studio.

"They actually have built the Metro user experience guidelines into the Visual Studio templates themselves and that's a brand new experiment for them," said Sells, who noted that "you have to deviate on purpose if that's what you want to do."

"What Telerik is doing with that," explained Sells," is building on that to make sure not only that our Windows 8 specific controls live up to that look and feel…but also we are seeing a lot of people push that Metro-style via their Web sites, via their desktop applications, and we have Metro-style support across our line of productivity tools via Visual Studio and across our line of controls, so that if people want to do that, we enable that."

Among the highlights of the company's Q2 2012 developer tools are 20 Metro templates (page and content) for Windows Phone development. A Visual Studio wizard helps developers build the infrastructure of the application so that they can focus on content.

The Q2 2012 release introduces three controls in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite: an HTML5 chart, RadODataDataSource and RadBarCode. Telerik is also offering a new mobile skin with "touch-friendly" font sizes and larger clickable areas as part of its AJAX tooling.

With this release, Telerik is debuting a diagramming framework for XAML developers called RadDiagrams. The XAML suites also feature a new RadHeatMap and a RadGantView beta control.

The company has cloud-enabled JustCode, a Visual Studio extension for code analysis and refactoring in C# and Visual Basic. Developers can now save their settings to the cloud and access those customizations from multiple systems and Visual Studio instances.

Telerik is also releasing version 1 of its Report Designer, which is a standalone Windows application, described as an ad hoc reporting tool. It does not require Visual Studio.