Many people have been eagerly waiting for telerik to enhance the r.a.d.calendar control with advanced scheduling features. According to a post from telerik, you'll have to continue waiting until 2007. With major enhancements for many other controls slated for the Q4 release, telerik will not be adding a full range of scheduling tools to calendar in Q4. There is some good news, though. We learned today that telerik will be adding some time-picking (in addition to date-picking) functionality to what is likely to be calendar 2.0 in December. This is a good first step towards a more full featured scheduling component and yet another feature to look forward to in the Q4 release.
6 comments:
Do you know how this scheduling will work? I don't exactly understand this feature.
Sleepyhead,
I assume you are asking about the time-picking feature planned for Q4? If so, I expect that it will be similar to some of the existing date/time picking tools out there. You can check out Peter Blum's time pickers here for an idea of what we may see: http://www.peterblum.com/DateControls/TimeMain.aspx.
The ability to pick both time and date with the calendar control is the foundation to building a full scheduling component. We can expect to see more scheduling features (like a visual scheduling tool - think Outlook Calendar) in 2007.
When I learn more about the details of this control, I'll be sure to post them here.
Isn't this what google calendar is for? :) Good API too i prefer to integrate into that these days.
Chris,
Yes and no. Google Calendar is more of an application than a component. Its API is good for sharing information with people or making it easy for your users to add information to their existing calendars, but it is not the type of flexible component that application developers require.
A scheduling component, like calendar may eventually become, enables developers to build applications with scheduling capabilities. That's a bit recursive, so let's just look at an example.
Let's say you are building an event management application that enables the event managers to schedule different speakers in available classrooms. A scheduling component could enable them to visually define the blocks of time during the event that each speaker will use the classroom and enable them to easily see which rooms are already booked.
As a developer, you might go a step further and use the Google Calendar API to enable your attendees to click a button and add a speaker's time slot to their Google Calendar.
Hopefully that makes the distinction clear. Let me know if you have any additional questions and I'll be happy to elaborate.
Look forward to the scheduling control.
I just switched from using the Infragistics suite to Teleriks controls (a number of reasons, all good for Telerik).
However the only control I an still using is their set of calender and scheduling controls. If you want a set of requirements for scheduling look at the Infragistics ones, they just about cover it all.
Looking forward to switching to Teleriks ones when thay come out.
Tony,
I'm glad to hear that telerik's controls suit your needs. They are definitely aware of the need for a scheduling control and have long said that version 2 of calendar would deliver full scheduling capabilities. Let's just hope that comes sooner rather than later. =)
As an aside, I'd be curious to hear some of your reasons for switching from Infra to Telerik. I don't want to make a spectacle of it though, so if you don't mind emailing me some of your reasons for switching I'd really appreciate it. (toddanglin [at] gmail)
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