15.2 Volume Release is just around the corner and I wanted to give you a sneak peak of what is in store for this release!

When we ship in mid-October, you'll see new features, new updates and new controls across all platforms.  We are still heavily invested in rich-client platforms like WPF & Windows Forms, we are innovating and expanding modern mobile, web & MVC development with Ignite UI, we are releasing new exciting features for iOS and Android developers, and finally you will see leaps forward in the design-collaborate-develop story with Indigo Studio. 

Our core goals for Ultimate remain the same, enabling you to:

• Build the Fastest and Easiest Office-Inspired, Touch-Enabled, Enterprise-Ready Apps
• Target Connected Mobile Experiences across Desktop, Tablet & Phone
• Easily Brand & Style Apps for any Platform
• Rapidly prototype and collaborate on app experiences before you write any code

 

Let’s get into the essentials and see what we did to improve these core areas of investment.

Web

When it comes to modern web development, ensuring you can use your framework of choice is a must.  We are continuing to invest in key frameworks like Knockout & AngularJS, as well as expanding our Visual Studio MVC support.  In 15.2 we've put the major efforts in refactoring all data-editors from the ground up, bringing the TreeGrid to a mature state, adding features to the Combo, improving the Data Grid, and introducing a Scaffolder for ASP.NET MVC. The final goal is to greatly boost developer productivity and provide much better experience out of the box.

 

Windows Forms

Window Forms is still the most widely used platform for Enterprise apps – and we are still heavily invested in new features and updates to our already deep Windows Forms offering.  In 15.2 we are focusing on expanding the capabilities of the business ready data visualization offerings of the UltraDataChart control – we’ve added new visualizations, added features improved touch and spent a lot of time ensuring you have the same experience in Windows Forms as you’ve had in WPF, JavaScript, iOS & Android with the data visualization experience.  We’ve also added ready to use Office 2013 style library files for Outlook and Excel.  Most exciting for 15.2 is the new Spreadsheet control – based on the work we did on the XAML spreadsheet, you can expect a great Excel experience without the requirement of Excel in your Windows Forms apps.

 

WPF

WPF for 15.2 is very customer-focused.  We’ve spent most of our time going through the User Voice requests and adding the much-needed features that you’ve all voted on.  We added a new xamBusyIndicator to make it easy for reporting the progress of a long running, multi-threaded, process; data validation added to xamSpreadsheet; new features and methods added to the xamDataChart, WorksheetTable, xamDataGrid and many more – all done to give developers an overall better development experience.

Native Mobile

Both iOS and Android received updates in 15.2.  We are moving forward with our cross-platform strategy to ensure that you get the same experience in key controls across native mobile and HTML platforms.  Most of the work we did in 15.2 centered around the brand new Data Grid control – a responsive modern native grid that we redesigned for mobile experiences.  We’ve included cool features like async load on demand, smooth scrolling for unlimited data set sizes, animations on orientation change and more.  We’ve also RTM’d the data chart, pie chart, bullet graph, gauge and barcodes, so the docs are complete and you’ll get an overall better experience when using the Android product. 

 

There is more work we’ve done, and more exciting announcements coming when we ship 15.2.  Stay tuned for our in-depth blog posts on each Dev tools product to get an inside look on everything that we’ve been working on to add value to your subscription and help you deliver great experiences to your customers!