RadControls for ASP.NET SP2 released today

Even though there is a lot to look forward to in the big Q1 2008 release in April, there is still plenty of work being done to deliver incremental improvements to your Q3 2007 controls. Along those lines comes today's announcement and immediate availability of the second service pack for the Q3 controls. This round of service packs for both the RadControls "classic" and the new RadControls "Prometheus" is actually full of new features and control improvements and something you'll probably want to download right away. Among the cool new features in SP2 (for "Prometheus") are:

• New export settings in RadGrid that enable you to control CSV column and row delimiters.
• New RadGrid RowHoverStyle that enables you to easily enable custom styling for your grid rows that is displayed when the mouse is over a row. All common skins now supply RowHover styles, too.
  
• Reduced RadScheduler client-side init time helps your page load faster.
• Web Services support in RadTooltip for easy web service data binding.
• New Overlay and KeepInScreenBounds properties for RadWindow.
• Significant script optimizations in RadEditor that greatly reduce the number of script links rendered to the page.

Even bigger than all of these improvements in "Prometheus" SP2, though, is a big change to how the control designers are distributed. As of this service pack, the RadControls "Prometheus" will no longer ship with a separate DLL for the control designers (Telerik.Web.Design.dll). Instead, all designers are now included in the single Telerik.Web.UI assembly.

This change was made to overcome insurmountable problems introduced by Microsoft in VS 2008 that caused the control designers to break when in a separate GAC'd assembly. The impact to you as a developer should be minimal, unless of course you were running in to the problems VS 2008 created, in which case the change should be a welcome improvement. The main point is that the RadControls "Prometheus" (and in turn the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX in Q1) will no longer require two assemblies. Everything will now exist in Telerik.Web.UI.dll.

Finally, for those of you that prefer to manage the loading of your UI component JavaScript files manually (versus relying on the automatic embedded resource approach), all RadControls "Prometheus" now support the EnableEmbeddedScripts property. By setting this property to false, you can turn-off the use of embedded resources and manage the loading of all RadControl script files however you like. Certainly not the most common scenario, but helpful for those that need it.

Check out the full release notes for more details and then download the new SP from your Client.net page. Enjoy the new bits!