Syncfusion has launched its fourth and final release of the year: Essential Studio® 2012, Volume 4. This release comes in a quarter when we also released Orubase Beta, our solution for cross-platform mobile development, Metro Studio 2, adding new features and images to our free icon design tool, and a beta of our WinRT controls.
So, it’s been a busy few months.
Volume 4 brings many enhancements to our ASP.NET MVC offering, adding an RDL report viewer and an OLAP client. This release also provides a number of theming options that can be used to style many of our controls in a new, modern look and feel.
We’re also ready for Office 2013. Our Ribbon control has been designed in the Office 2013 style, and both DocIO and XlsIO now support the Office 2013 file format, meaning your applications can create and modify Word and Excel 2013 files.
Release highlights
The RDL report viewer, a successful part of our Reporting Edition for WPF and Silverlight, is now available for ASP.NET MVC. This rendering component displays reports defined in Microsoft’s RDL format, a format that will be around for a long time. With it, users can display tabular, graphical, or free-form server or client reports that use relational, multi-dimensional, XML, and object data sources.
Essential BI Client, a solid component from our Business Intelligence Edition, is now available for ASP.NET MVC. This OLAP client is used to analyze SSAS cubes with GUI interactions. Data can be explored using slicers, filters, and summaries. Measures and dimensions can be dropped into horizontal or vertical axes, allowing you to pivot data.
We’ve also added new themes that can be implemented in ASP.NET MVC and Windows Forms.
The Windows Phone look and feel has fonts, colors, and an overall appearance that is best suited for mobile. Now that look and feel can be applied to Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC controls: footers, tabs, list boxes, typical buttons, toolbars, menus, dialog boxes, and toggle buttons.
Windows 8 styling can be applied to all ASP.NET MVC and Windows Forms controls. This allows you to apply a customizable, modern theme—previously known as “Metro”—to all your MVC and WinForms interfaces.
We’ve also introduced a Windows 8-style Tile control for Windows Forms. It’s an interface that emulates the Windows 8 Start screen in Windows Forms applications. Tiles can be dragged to different locations in different groups, or within the same group, and live tiles, a staple of the new Windows interface, can be updated with rotating content.
Our styling efforts aren’t confined to Windows 8 alone. We’ve applied an Office 2013 theme to our ribbon; even the backstage has been styled. And we’ve provided impressive graphics that can be used to decorate the ribbon’s title bar.
Regarding other Office 2013 enhancements, Essential DocIO is now compatible with Word 2013, and Essential XlsIO is compatible with Excel 2013. This allows you to create and modify these Office 2013 files within your application without relying on either Word or Excel.
Volume 4 and an eventful year
This year ends with one of the greatest UI-design shifts in the last 25 years: Windows 8. Our latest release helps you move with this shift. Whether it’s our WinRT controls, or that you can now apply Windows Phone and Windows 8 styling to non-WinRT controls, you’ll have many options for updating your applications.
Of course, there are additional features and improvements across all our controls, too numerous to mention in this blog. Please see for yourself in the What’s New section of our site.
