Telerik WPF Controls Tutorial

by Daniel R. Spalding

In Detail

Telerik Reporting is a lightweight reporting solution for all .NET cloud, web, and desktop platforms (Azure, Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, and Windows Forms) which targets developers and end users alike. Rich interactive and reusable reports can be created by developers in Visual Studio and by end users in the desktop-based Report Designer.

This book will guide you through working with specific Telerik WPF controls as well as working with the database and other methods to load the controls. It will focus on four key technologies: the DataContext property of WPF, Telerik RadControls for WPF, XML serialization, and application security.

Starting with the basics, Telerik WPF Controls Tutorial will take you from the simple usage of a DataTable to serializing XML files into objects, covering a discussion of different types of security and validation for WPF windows along the way.

This book will start out by showing you the simple methods of populating Telerik RadControls using a DataTable. You will then move on to look at populating a generic list of objects from a database as well as serializing XML files into class objects. You will cover how to secure a WPF application using a simple database example as well as Active Directory to determine navigation control loading. You will then review using the Telerik API interface classes to load Gantt information. With this book, you will be guided through building an application with the addition of all the important controls along with provisions for data entry, layouts, editors, navigation, and scheduling.

This book will teach you the different aspects of the Telerik controls, from using the DataContext property to loading the controls using the Telerik API references. The book will also cover other WPF subjects such as security and WPF validation of the DataContext property.

Approach

This book follows a hands-on, example-based approach to demonstrate how to efficiently integrate Telerik RadControls within a WPF application.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who plans to use Telerik controls within a WPF application. The reader should have an existing knowledge of C#, SQL, and object-oriented design. The book will focus on the use of objects to populate the controls, so knowledge of object-oriented design is very important.

125 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Damir Arh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book started out with a useful discussion in favor of using third party controls instead of customizing Microsoft’s default ones yourself. Unfortunately this wasn’t followed up with information I expected. I missed a lot of useful details that would help me decide whether to use these controls or not: their advantages in comparison to standard controls, which properties are bindable and which not, different options for getting the entered data back from controls, etc. I would much prefer more complex real world control usage scenarios instead of the really basic samples.

Although the book is already really short, it still contains too much content, hardly related to Telerik controls. Instead of diving into their built-in validation support, the author focused on his own implementation. A lot of attention was given to loading the data for the controls from various sources. I would prefer the sample data just being there and having its structure explained in more detail instead of having to check the accompanying code for that. This content also felt very repetitive, appearing in each chapter with only minor differences. The whole section about authentication seemed completely out of place to me, as well.

In my opinion this book is a big missed opportunity. What could have been a show case of designing great UI featuring Telerik’s controls with recommended best practices and usage patterns, turned out to only be a shallow overview of a small subset of available controls, interspersed with random opinionated half accurate information. I can hardly recommend the book to anyone except maybe to beginners in WPF with no previous exposure to any third party controls, and even they could be better served elsewhere.