With today's launch, we are extremely excited to get Ultimate 21.2 into your hands. Featuring updates across all major platforms, we continue to focus on making you a high-performance developer – with productivity tools, modern UI framework support, and the fastest grids and charts on the planet. For Windows Forms and WPF, we’ve updated all controls to .NET 6 including updated designer for Visual Studio.

Ultimate 21.2 builds on three key themes:

• Hyper-productivity with App Builder, a WYSIWYG web IDE for web app building plus a complete design-to-code platform
• Delivering innovations and new experiences in Blazor, Angular, React & Web Components
• .NET 6 Support for web & desktop, including WPF, Windows Forms, ASP.NET Core, & ASP.NET MVC

Let’s look at these areas in more detail.

App Builder - Accelerate Design & Development

App Builder is a new design-to-code platform with the industry's first web-based, WYSIWYG IDE. App Builder brings a VB6 like drag & drop experience to building screens and flows for modern web, at the same time improving designer-to-dev collaboration while eliminating UI and UX bugs.

With App Builder, you get:

• Web-based IDE that is similar to tools you use today, like Visual Studio, Sketch, Figma, or Adobe XD.
• A toolbox full of UI components from the Indigo.Design System, which map directly to our Ignite UI Angular & Blazor component libraries.
• Property editor panels for configuring components and setting data binding properties.
• Hierarchical views of your master-pages and sub-pages, complete with a navigable outline of your screen design.
• Data sources options that let you connect to any REST data source or upload a JSON file.
• Theme options including built-in themes and a custom theme builder to match any customer or brand experience you require.

This is the App Builder in Design Mode showing a sample that ships with the product:

The biggest news with this release for the .NET developer is App Builder and Blazor. If you are not familiar with App Builder, you need to start using it today. It is arguably the most impactful software for you as a developer that we’ve ever shipped - and with this release we’ve moved beyond Angular code generation and added Blazor!

This means you can create any Blazor UI with simple drag & drop and get all of the production ready Razor, C# and CSS code in a single click!

Learn More about App Builder and how it can elevate your productivity, impress your boss on how quickly you can build new experiences, and how you can deliver the best customer experiences with the least amount of effort.

Blazor Updates, New Controls & More!

With the release of .NET 6, Ignite UI for Blazor 21.2 now has full support for .NET 6 and all the benefits you get with the new .NET, including hot reload, enhanced debugging, smaller WASM deployments, and more!

This Blazor release is all about getting you more Data Grid features, and lots more controls. Here is a summary of what you will get with this release, for full details, check out the Blazor launch blog.

Blazor Grid New Features:

• Interactive Group By
• Fixed Filter Row
• Cell Merging
• Save / Load Layout

New Blazor UI Controls:

Avatar Badge Button Link button Calendar Card Checkbox Form Icon

Icon button Input List Navigation bar Navigation drawer Radio Button Radio Group Ripple Slider Switch

This example of App Builder shows the sample People App side-by-side with the Razor Code Preview.

We’ll continue to deliver more Blazor controls, and more Data Grid features as we lead in to 22.1 next year. The goal is 100% parity with the Ignite UI Angular controls, which is hands down the most complete set of UI controls on the market for modern web development.  We want to bring that same completeness to the Blazor control set so when you are ready to move to Blazor, we have everything you need to deliver the best experience possible. Everything that we ship in terms of UI controls is also part of App Builder, so you can WYSIWYG your app design, and get the benefit of everything App Builder brings to the table.

Angular 13 Update and New Controls

We continue to deliver huge value in Angular, with dozens of new features, enhancements and additions in this latest release. Besides the new Stepper and Simple Combo controls, this release builds on the last minor and major Angular releases we’ve shipped, including:

• Conditional row styling across all grids
• Updated styling capabilities in Dock Manager 
• Add New Row at the top of the Grid(s) 
• Multi-column Headers and Frozen Column Row in Export-to-Excel service 
• Grouping Pipe and Group Area for Angular Tree Grid 
• Localization for 19 new languages

Here is the new Angular Stepper Component in action showing a step-by-step process in an e-Commerce app.

Learn more in the What's New in Angular 13 blog!

Web Components New Controls & Updates!

Web Components continue to be the framework-agnostic future of the web. Supported by every major browser, with all the power and flexibility you need to build modern web apps, Web Components are the perfect choice if you are not aligned with a framework or if you are looking to avoid framework lock-in with your next project. The Ignite UI Web Components story in 21.2 aligns with what we are shipping in Blazor – much demanded Web Components Data Grid features, plus tons of new controls that bring you the ability to build complete, branded experiences.

Here is a summary of what you will get with this release, for full details, check out the Web Components launch blog.

Web Components Grid New Features:

• Interactive Group By
• Fixed Filter Row
• Cell Merging
• Save / Load Layout

New Web Components UI Controls:

Avatar Badge Button Link button Calendar Card Checkbox Form Icon

Icon button Input List Navigation bar Navigation drawer Radio Button Radio Group Ripple Switch

This sample demonstrates the Web Component Electron app showing DockManager in a real desktop UX with multiple pane and multi-monitor support.

We’ll continue to deliver more Web Components controls, and more Data Grid features as we lead in to 22.1 next year. As with the Blazor control set, the goal is 100% parity with the Ignite UI Angular controls, which is hands down the most complete set of UI controls on the market for modern web development.  In Q1 2022, we will also ship Web Components code generation to App Builder, so all Web Components UI controls will also part of App Builder, so you can WYSIWYG your app design, and build Web Components apps 10x faster than ever before!

React New Controls & Updates!

React is getting similar updates in the React Grid as Blazor and Web Components, including:

• Interactive Group By
• Fixed Filter Row
• Cell Merging
• Save / Load Layout

For full release details, check out the React launch blog.

We’ll continue to deliver more React controls, and more React Data Grid features as we lead in to 22.1 The goal is 100% parity with the Ignite UI Angular controls, which will be another 40+ UI controls in the Q1 2022 timeline.  In Q1 2022, we will also ship React code generation to App Builder, so all React UI controls will also be part of App Builder, so you can WYSIWYG your app design, and build React apps 10x faster than ever before!

Desktop WPF & Windows Forms

Windows Forms and WPF continue to be the most popular platforms for building apps in the enterprise space. This release includes over dozens improvements in charts, geospatial maps, updated designers for .NET 6 in Visual Studio 2022, and more.

Here is a quick list with some links to the updates:

• Updated design-time support in Visual Studio 2022 for Windows Forms & WPF
• Windows Forms Updates
• WPF Updates

Wrap Up!

That’s a short blog of the features and updates with links to the more detailed blogs on what we are shipping in 21.2. This release includes a ton of great new capabilities that will help you deliver amazing experiences in your apps. To experience everything, go to your customer portal to get the latest. As usual, we need to hear what you have to say, so please shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com and let me know how we can help you to continue to deliver value to your customers with Infragistics.

Happy Coding!

Jason