This is my first post, and by obligation I have to say a few words as an
introduction. I'm Mihail Valkov, and I have been working on component
development at Telerik for several years. I know my name comes a bit mouthful
for many of you, so I'll just use Mike for short. I'm the guy behind some of our
Windows Forms components and part of the team that created the great TPF.
I am excited of the many good things to come in our WinForms offering in the
near future and I am determined to keep you posted about them.
As you already know, we had a great experience last week on TechEd. We showed
off yet another new app that seems to come from the WPF world, but is actually
built using Widows Forms. This is possible thanks to our RadControls for
WinForms and the TPF.
To be more precise it was built using the RadCarousel control, some cool images
and a couple hours of work to put them together in this great way:
It wouldn't be so easy without TPF and RadCarousel though. Even, if you think
about the many hours you have to spend dealing with GDI+, imaging APIs I would
say - it's simply not doable. Most probably, you would simply not want to spent so
much time and effort on just creating that kind of UI, even though it's pretty
cool. But what if this comes really easy? And it actually does, if you use the
RadCarousel control.
So here is what this app does. It animates some images through a virtual 3D
ellipse, until the user hovers her mouse over any of them. A window pops-up upon
clicking an item, animating some text and image items, in a Silverlight kind of
fashion. The carousel control offers a simple yet elegant way to navigate though
a bunch of items. And if the actual selection from a list of items is the piece
of UI, you want to highlight in any Form in your app, the carousel control might
offer your users a great experience.
I must say I was pretty pleased at
TechEd, when anyone kept asking - "is this a WPF app" and I have been answering
- no, this actually is a WinForms app, built using the Telerik tools. Ok, I know
you can do a lot more with WPF, but my point is - if you care about the look and
feel of your WinForms apps you still have an easy option - simply use
RadControls on key places in your apps.
You might also find it interesting that we used only the Form's resx file and
AppSettings to store all
data about carousel items. This was possible because all carousel items are
actually simple RadButtonElement items which appear as components in your
designer. You can select and tweak them as you wish. In this case, we just bound
some of their properties to AppSettings values.
This is just an example of how great Windows Forms features come together
easy with RadControls.
Since there are some you already asking about this
demo, I must say I'll be really excited to post this cool app on our Code
Library right away. Some of the magic though will be available in Q2 version
in about a month, so stay tuned ;)