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It's an exciting time for developers using Visual Studio 2012 or targeting Windows 8. With recent announcements regarding availability of these products, the obvious question of support with Kendo UI is being asked by developers. Rest assured, the team building Kendo UI has been working hard to ensure that the support for these environments is rock-solid. In this blog post, I'll be highlighting the features we've implemented that underscore our commitment to you - our customers - for both Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8.

Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC

A few weeks ago, we shipped Kendo UI Q2 2012. At part of that release, we introduced Kendo UI Complete for ASP.NET MVC, a set of server wrappers that simplifies building applications and sites with Kendo UI in ASP.NET MVC.

Kendo UI Complete for ASP.NET MVC enables developers comfortable with the ASP.NET MVC framework to easily incorporate and configure Kendo UI via familiar server-side programming instead of relying solely on manual HTML and JavaScript. Kendo UI Complete for ASP.NET MVC adds both extra functionality to the existing Kendo UI libraries (such as server-side rendering, grid server binding, data annotations support, etc.), and it does make it easier for developers to use Kendo UI with ASP.NET MVC. Futhermore, we have committed to support both ASP.NET MVC 3 and ASP.NET MVC 4. This also applies with some of the latest and greatest innovations being utilized by ASP.NET developers. For example, we get a lot of questions about support for WebAPI. Recently, Burke Holland and I have written a series of blog posts that demonstrate how to integrate features like WebAPI (and others) with Kendo UI:

• Ask Kendo UI: Server-Side Sorting With WebAPI
• TeamPulse (Hearts) Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC
• HTML Helper Basics of Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC Beta
• ASP.NET Web Forms and HTML5
• Hello Services / WebAPI, REST, JSON and AJAX

Ultimately, this means you can build ASP.NET applications and sites with Kendo UI, both now and in the future, with Visual Studio 2012.

Visual Studio Extensions for Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC

The Visual Studio Extensions for Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC projects is an integration package that aims at significantly increasing your productivity when managing MVC projects in Visual Studio 2012 (and Visual Studio 2010):

It provides a step-by-step wizard that's designed to automatically bootstrap your project:

Getting your Kendo UI projects up-and-running in Visual Studio 2012 is a snap!

IntelliSense Support in Visual Studio 2012

An important feature of Visual Studio is its support for JavaScript IntelliSense. This feature enables developers to be productive when building applications that target JavaScript by providing them with type information and signatures for functions. This is accomplished using an additional vsdoc JavaScript file. With Kendo UI, each bundle package contains a vsdoc directory, which contains a vsdoc.js file. Putting this file next to your Kendo UI will enable you to utilize IntelliSense in Visual Studio:

We've outlined the steps necessary to make this work in Visual Studio on our new documentation site.

NuGet Package Support for Kendo UI Web in Visual Studio 2012

Many developers appreciate the package management capabilities of Visual Studio via NuGet. Its ability to manage dependencies, all while integrating within new or existing solutions, gives many developers - especially web developers - a huge boost to their overall productivity. For developers targeting Kendo UI Web, this integration is supported for Visual Studio 2012 via the Kendo UI Web NuGet package:

Alternatively, you can integrate Kendo UI Web via the Package Management Console of Visual Studio 2012:

As part of this deployment, we include a dependency to jQuery and pull down all the necessary JavaScript and CSS files required for applications and sites targeting Kendo UI Web. This integrate means that you can start targeting Kendo UI Web quickly and easily for the projects you're working on in Visual Studio 2012.

Kendo UI in Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8

We're tremendously supportive of the commitment made by Microsoft to supporting and improving the modern web. Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on Windows 8 represents a significant step forward for users and developers alike. For users, it provides a highly performant and secure browsing environment. For developers, it provides a platform for building advanced web applications and sites with modern web standards. All in all, there's a lot to like with IE10. In fact, Kendo UI leverages many features of the HTML5 and CSS3 specifications that are supported by IE10, including:

• CSS transitions and CSS transforms for widget effects and animations;
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for generating rich, data visualizations;
• HTML5 custom data attributes (data-*) to convey configuration metadata;
• and, touch input via Pointer events for user interaction with widgets and data visualizations.

In the case of both IE9 and IE10, the applications and sites you build with Kendo UI will utilize hardware accelerated graphics and text. This is evidenced by the effects and animations we generate for widget interactions in Kendo UI Web. It's also evidenced by the charts and gauges we produce for Kendo UI DataViz. The end result of hardware acceleration is a web experience that feels native. Granted, support for many of these capabilities was first introduced with IE9. However, it's good to see Microsoft continues to move the web forward with IE10.

It's worth mentioning that Windows 8 enables web developers to leverage their existing skills by enabling them to build native applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. At the moment, we're working hard on a set of controls designed specifically for Windows 8. These controls have language bindings for both XAML and HTML.

Looking Ahead

Our team is tremendously excited by the upcoming releases of Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8. Moving ahead, we're committed to ensuring that both products are strongly supported by our team. That means that you'll be able to build next generation applications and sites that target Kendo UI with the knowledge that they work very well in both environments.

About the Author
John Bristowe (@JohnBristowe) is a Developer Evangelist with Telerik and is based out of Melbourne, Australia. John enjoys all the meats of our technology stew, hacking on everything from angle brackets to .NET. John's passion lies in modern web standards like HTML5 and CSS3. His website is bristowe.com.