Telerik has traditionally been known for its .NET components, but this quarter’s release rounds out a suite of tools for developer productivity and application quality.
Telerik today unveiled its Q2 2010 milestone release, including a tool to reduce the size of Silverlight application assemblies; an Object Role Modeling (ORM) designer with roundtrip mapping; and a commercial version of Telerik’s JustMock unit testing tool.
Telerik’s Assembly Minifier is a new Web-based tool that decreases the size of its RadControls for Silverlight, as well as the overall Silverlight application file size. It only includes the Telerik controls and resources that are needed for an application, explained chief evangelist Todd Anglin.
Reducing the size of Silverlight assemblies is important because the end user must download the entire application up front, he explained. “A big application negatively affects the start time and user experience.”
An updated version of Telerik’s OpenAccess ORM Visual Designer plug-in for Visual Studio gives developers the option to choose between schema-first and model-first mapping at any time. It can reverse-map an existing schema, then update that schema by updating the mapped model classes, according to the company.
A new data services wizard generates Visual Studio code and project files for OpenAccess entities with data services. It supports Microsoft’s ADO.NET Data Services, Windows Communication Foundation, as well as the ATOM publishing protocol and RESTful interfaces.
For testing, Telerik shipped JustMock, a tool that creates mock objects for unit testing. “It creates stunt doubles for real objects, and a database doesn’t need to be involved,” Anglin explained. Developers can mock away dependencies and create better unit tests, he added.
Another testing tool has added the ability to perform automated UI tests on Silverlight applications outside of the browser. Developers can now reuse the same tests for applications running either inside or outside of the browser for full coverage of Silverlight applications, Anglin said.
As is customary for each release, Telerik also updated its .NET controls with 12 new controls for both Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. It introduced a rich text box for Silverlight that can read, import and export DOCX, HTML, Word and XAML files.
Telerik likewise expanded its Windows Forms control suite with five new controls, and a new data grid engine that it says can support enterprise data-intensive scenarios.
