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Progress Telerik Dev Tools Update Boosts Xamarin UI
As part of 2018's first major release of Progress Telerik developer tools for .NET-centric development, the Telerik UI for Xamarin offering sports several new features and updates.
Telerik UI for Xamarin is an adjunct toolkit for creating cross-platform mobile apps with Xamarin in the Visual Studio IDE, featuring more than 70 UI components to complement default Visual Studio components.
For example, the new release features a new toolbox windows from which developers can select components such as BarChart, ShapeRating and more and quickly drag them onto a XAML page. This duplicates the default toolbox experience in Visual Studio, with Progress describing the functionality as "just what you are familiar with in all other traditional Microsoft development platforms."
Other new controls include Numeric Input (for entering an age, height and so on), Button (said to provide a "richer experience" than the default) and Entry (a form, with many customization options).
The company especially highlighted the DataGrid, which was introduced as a preview in a previous release.
"DataGrid is now official, speeding up your development and allowing you to set up data intensive scenarios, both for phones and tablets," the company said in a blog post. "It enables you to use its dynamic binding to Enumerable."
The now-official DataGrid allows for data operations like filtering, grouping and sorting via a parallel engine, obviating the previous requirement to build and set the appropriate data descriptors from code. It also features many customizations, cell editing functionality, load on demand (adding incremental data as needed, for visualizing new data points or automatic loading of new items upon scrolling to the last available record) and more.
"DataGrid now allows you to use its UI to apply sorting, filtering and grouping dynamically," the company said. "It generates the UI based on the column type -- for example, the filtering of dates, numeric and string data can be done directly from the UI. It also allows you to build your own filtering control UI for any specific data type. In addition, the user can choose the order and the number of visible columns using our column chooser."
Beyond Telerik UI for Xamarin, which targets mobile app developers, the company also shipped its larger, comprehensive package, Telerik R1 2018. In addition to the improvements to the Xamarin suite, it features new Kendo UI React components, Fluent design theme and more than 30 new back-end database providers for the company's reporting solution.
More information about all of the above can be found in the What's New page.