Day 1: Working with Telerik Silverlight RadControls

Telerik has a great collection of Silverlight controls named as "RadControls". These controls are built on Microsoft Silverlight and includes 40+ UI controls for building rich line-of-business Silverlight applications. They have some great themes to support those controls.

Some of my readers asked me to write articles on Telerik RadControls. As I received a couple of request, hence thought to start with that. I will write a series of articles on my exploration on that and this is the first one of them. Read to know more about it.

Introduction

As I mentioned above, Telerik has a great collection of Silverlight Controls in their RadControls library. They also have support for various custom themes. You can use these controls in your application to give a rich UI look. Before starting to the rest of the topics, let me tell you that, these controls are not freely available. You can download the free trial version or purchase the license from the below links:

In this package, you will find the following components:

Installation

As this is my first day working with Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, so started with the installation process and this article will also cover my first day experience. Once you downloaded the library, run the installer. Click "Next" in the welcome screen of the installer to continue.

Accept the Terms and Conditions of Telerik RadControls in the 2nd screen and click "Next".

The third screen will ask you whether to do a Complete installation or Custom installation. Choose the appropriate one based on your need. I generally use the Custom installation. Hence went thru it.

In the custom installation wizard, it will ask you to chose the options that you want to install. It includes Demos, Documentations, Library assemblies, Themes, Visual Studio and Blend Extension.

Click next to continue. In the final step it will ask you to confirm the installation of the product. Click "Install" to confirm and start the installation process.

It will start installation of the product. Will take some time to complete the installation process.

In the final screen, click "Finish" to close the installation dialog. Your library has been installed in your PC. There is an option called "Launch Demos" in the final screen as shown below. It is by default checked. Once you click Finish, it will launch the demo application for you.

The demo application will start loading the modules. The loader itself has a great UI. I really love it.

Once the loading is done, you will see the below screen:

Here, click on the "Browse Controls" to see about all the controls present in the RadControls library.

Click each one of them to play with it to understand about the controls of the product.

Validating Installation

To verify whether the installation was proper, open your Visual Studio 2010 IDE and click on Create New Project. In the "New Project" dialog Window, select Silverlight from the left panel. This will filter out the Silverlight templates for you.

In the main panel you will see a template called "RadControls Silverlight Application". Select this as the default template for your project, if you want to create a sample project.

In the next step click "Ok". This will ensure that you are creating a web project for hosting your Silverlight application.

In the third screen (as shown below) will give you option to include various libraries required for your application. Chose the appropriate library assembly that you want to use. Cool thing is that, the dependency libraries will also get selected when you select any assembly from that.

In the same screen, there is an other tab called "Themes" just after the "Components" tab. Click on that tab to chose the themes require for your application.

Here is a screenshot of the same:

Click "Finish" to create your first blank RadControls project. Build and Run to check for any errors.

End Note

This is just the introductory part of the same and hence just introduced you with the library including the installation process. Read my next chapter, where I will demonstrate you by creating a simple Hello World application using Telerik RadControls for Silverlight library. That will include introduction to some basic controls of the library too.

Cheers and enjoy reading my next articles on the same topic. Suggestions are always welcome.