It's been a good week for Telerik, the developer of tools and UI components for .NET. On the heels of winning a recent "Best of TechEd Award" in the Software Components category for is Ultimate Collection for .NET 2010, the company learned it has also been nominated for a Dr. Dobb's Jolt Award in the Application Library and Frameworks category for its RadControl tools. And on top of this, Telerik announced a raft of new tools and upgrades to existing ones.

Among the new products and updates are RichTextBox for Silverlight, Silverlight Assembly Minifier, a tool for assembly size optimization, Round Trip Mapping for the Visual Designer in Telerik's OpenAccess ORM, new enhancements to the company's automated testing tools, and JustMock, a new Visual Studio tool allowing mocking of objects during testing.

The RadRichTextBox for Silverlight lets you bring true Microsoft Word-like content editing experience to users. The new control offers rich text editing and formatting capabilities, import/export of HTML, DOCX, and XAML, as well as out-of-browser support and printing.

Another addition to the Silverlight suite is the Telerik Assembly Minifier, a web-based tool that decreases the size of RadControls for Silverlight assemblies and consecutively the overall Silverlight application file size. It lets you create optimized custom assemblies that only contain the Telerik controls and resources needed for a specific application.

The release also marks the debut of Round Trip Mapping capabilities in the Telerik OpenAccess ORM Visual Designer. Developers traditionally must decide between Schema-first and Model-first mapping when working with ORM tools, like Entity Frameworks (EF), a decision, which is then set for the project duration. With OpenAccess Round Trip Mapping and the Visual Designer, you can employ either approach at any time, for example, reverse-mapping an existing schema then updating that schema by simply updating the mapped model classes. Used in conjunction with Visual Designer, all tasks can be achieved in Visual Studio.

Additionally, Telerik released a commercial version of its JustMock, a tool that lets Visual Studio developers create object mockings during unit testing. By breaking dependencies in unit tests, you can focus on testing single concerns, providing more complete unit test coverage and improving overall software testing quality.

Other upgrades announced include:

• Unit Test Runner for JustCode, for running critical tests in Visual Studio
• 12 new controls for its XAML suites including TreeListView for both Silverlight and WPF, DataPager, DataFilter
• The official launch of the Telerik Data Services Wizard, which facilitates automatic creation of C# or Visual Basic code and project files needed to use OpenAccess entities with Data Services for .NET 3.5 SP1 Version 1 and 2 (Astoria), WCF EndPoints Service, REST Collection WCF Services, and ATOM Publishing Protocol WCF Service
• Additions to the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC suite, including an ASP.NET MVC Editor, offering identical HTML output across all major browsers
• Telerik Reporting support for interactive reports that allow end-users to drill down through reports and subreports, jump to other sections in a report, and access external URLs via hyperlinks
• An expanded WinForms suite that integrates five new controls, as well as a new GridView data engine for enterprise data-intensive scenarios

— Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com