Telerik, a leading vendor of developer tools and user interface components for .NET, announced today that RadGridView for Silverlight will be officially released with the upcoming Q1 2009 release in early March, 2009.

'Optimizing the different aspects of performance has always been among our first priorities,' said Nikolay Atanasov, Silverlight Team Unit Manager. 'To that end, we are introducing 3 new techniques to significantly reduce page loading time and to provide better user experience.'

The unique RadCompression module compresses the entire Web Service traffic in a completely codeless manner, resulting in smaller data transfer and better performance of the application. With the asynchronous databinding of Telerik Silverlight Grid, the application is responsive even while loading a large dataset. Finally, thanks to the direct data operations developers no longer need to wrap data in collection views in order to perform sorting, grouping and filtering.

Other important new features of the Silverlight grid are the Excel-like filtering and frozen columns. What is more, end-users can now export data to Word, Excel and CSV with just a few clicks. Another addition to the control is the Masked TextBox editor with support for DateTime masks, Numeric masks, as well as a set of commonly used masks.

Bridging the gap between desktop and web environments is a core strategy of Telerik. That's why Telerik Silverlight Grid is a mirror counterpart of RadGridView for WPF, sharing the same codebases and API, which guarantees synchronized future development.

The new volume of RadControls for Silverlight will also include the official release of RadChart, RadDocking, RadToolBar, and RadColorPicker, and a CTP release of RadEditor for Silverlight.