Essential Studio 2016 Volume 2 is here, and as Syncfusion users have come to expect, it arrives with dozens of updates to just about every platform we support. However, this blog is just a small preview of some new features we think you’ll be particularly excited to see.
Syncfusion already offers the largest collection of Xamarin components, but we pressed on to defend our hard-earned position and added new controls and several updates to existing controls. One of the new controls is the kanban board, which is a great tool for visualizing and organizing workflows.
Another addition for Xamarin is the data source control. Unlike most of our Xamarin controls, this one is not a UI component. Instead, is a backend control that consumes raw data and is able to perform sorting, filtering, and grouping operations on it.
As for new features in our Xamarin controls, the chart control receives some notables in the form of the new step area series and technical indicators available. Another control receiving great new features is the data grid, which now supports unbound columns and groups that can be expanded or collapsed at run time.
The kanban control managed to make its way into our UWP controls too, along with new cell grid, tree grid, and spell checker controls.
In updates to existing Syncfusion UWP controls, the PDF viewer now supports text, shape, and freehand ink annotations that can be added from inside the control. Plus, the spreadsheet control now offers a complete find and replace dialog.
Essential Studio for JavaScript has received a landmark update in the form of support for the Aurelia framework. This support is comprised of Syncfusion’s JavaScript components, wrapped and made available as native Aurelia components. Another significant addition to our JavaScript components is improved Angular 2 support, which further expands the flexibility of Syncfusion JavaScript components for developers working within web development frameworks.
As for new JavaScript controls, we now offer sparkline, heat map, and pivot tree map controls for visualizing data in all kinds of settings. Sparklines provide compact, lightweight charts that can be interpreted at a glance. Heat maps implement a gradient of colors to provide a visual indicator of quantitative information, such as dark shades of a color for high numbers and light shades of the color for low numbers. The pivot tree map displays OLAP data in the form of nested nodes in a hierarchical order.
All Syncfusion JavaScript controls have also been updated to responsively render on phone, tablet, and desktop devices. You’d be hard-pressed to find any other set of JavaScript controls so varied and so well-suited for cross-device web development.
Last but not least, the ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC collections also received new heat map and kanban controls, and Windows Forms received a new spell checker control. Lots of small customer-requested features and updates are also included in 2016 Volume 2, but they are far too numerous to list here. You can read What’s New for a comprehensive list.
If you’re already a Syncfusion user, you can download the latest release by logging into your Direct-Trac account. If you have yet to give Syncfusion components a try, we strongly recommend you download a free, 30-day trial. The trial gives you access to all of our web, desktop, and mobile components, plus our enterprise solutions, which include the Syncfusion Big Data Platform, Dashboard Platform, and Report Platform. Let us know what you’re eager to try in the comments below, or on Twitter and Facebook.
