New Telerik ASP.NET MVC UI Extensions CTP launched today

Ready for some big news? If you're on Twitter then you've probably already seen this announcement (hint, hint), but I know from surveys that many of you are not in to the whole "Twitter-thing" (and I don't blame you). So, on to the news... Today Telerik announced (and released) the brand new Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, a completely open source and purpose built UI "component" suite for MVC. The announcement of this new product is significant for (at least) two reasons:

1. This is the first UI "component" approach built natively for ASP.NET MVC. These are not WebForms controls "hacked" or "squeezed" in to an MVC environment. This is a brand new UI Extension framework that fully embraces the values of ASP.NET MVC - lightweight rendering, clean HTML IDs, clear separation of concerns, easy testability, etc.- while helping make you more productive building MVC views. Our UI Extensions will work in any ASP.NET MVC View Engine, too, and the downloadable samples include projects using both Spark and NHaml.
2. This is Telerik's first open source product. As a small commercial company, it's obviously a big step to introduce a truly open source product. We have a strong desire to support the ASP.NET MVC community, though, and we know open platforms are important to many MVC developers. The source for the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC will be hosted on CodePlex (binaries on Telerik.com) and licensed under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) - the same license that governs the ASP.NET MVC framework. That means these UI Extensions are 100% free to use, modify, and do with what you please.

This first release is a CTP and only a preview of the power of the underlying UI Extension framework. To show-off the framework, we have included wrappers for some of the jQueryUI client-side components. These wrappers are "proofs-of-concept" meant only to highlight the framework's approach to defining UI in MVC, and in our next release you'll start to see new, custom-built Telerik UI Extensions, like Grid, Menu, and TabStrip. For now, be sure to read the full announcement post by Team Lead Atanas Korchev for all the important details and then jump-over to Telerik.com to download the CTP bits. We hope you enjoy this new open source product from Telerik and we look forward to hearing your feedback!