Last week, Syncfusion released its third major update of the year, Essential Studio 2015 Volume 3. This release advances Syncfusion’s offering in three primary areas of development. For web, there’s a new spreadsheet control, for desktop, a new 3-D surface chart is available, and for cross-platform developers, Syncfusion has added a PDF Viewer to its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) offering, which also includes new data grid and ribbon controls.
Web developers will be excited to see the JavaScript spreadsheet control. It has editing operations similar to Microsoft Excel and the ability to import and export workbook files. Theme Studio is another important addition to Syncfusion’s web offering. It’s an intuitive, visual tool for creating CSS files and is now available for JavaScript, ASP.NET, and ASP.NET MVC. Theme Studio styling not only includes static elements, like headers and content, but also includes states such the default, hover, and active states.
Theme Studio for JavaScript
Desktop developers will be interested in the 3-D surface chart, which plots data points across three axes and uses a three-dimensional surface to depict the relationship between two sets of data. And the same Theme Studio that was introduced for web development is also available for WPF applications.
Mobile developers will find that two time-management controls have been added to Syncfusion’s iOS and Android offerings: a calendar control for selecting and viewing dates by month or year, and a schedule control that allows you to create and view appointments in four different layouts. The schedule control also supports recurring appointments and localization.
A data grid has been added to Syncfusion’s newest suite of controls for UWP. This powerful control was built to meet the rigorous standards of enterprise apps. It includes sorting, filtering, interactive grouping, and summary rows. Grid content, along with formatting, can be exported as Excel or PDF files.
Another major enhancement to Essential Studio for UWP is the PDF Viewer, which allows you to view PDFs—all without any dependency on Adobe. Whether used on mobile or desktop apps, PDF Viewer supports searching PDF text, selecting text across pages, and even copying that text to the clipboard.
PDF Viewer for Mobile
One of the newer and more exciting platforms added just this year was Syncfusion’s offering of Xamarin controls. Now, new chart types have been added to the chart control, including pyramid and funnel charts, and the data grid control for Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS can export data to PDF or Excel files.
Volume 3’s advances are not reserved for the newest and most popular platforms only. Syncfusion continues to move forward in all other platforms. Essential Studio for WinRT, for example, adds a new spreadsheet control. And many new features have been added to Essential Studio for Windows Forms and Essential Studio for Silverlight.
Too many features have been added in Volume 3 to be properly included in one blog. If you’re curious to know all the latest updates, please see our What’s New section. For a free trial of our controls, all you need to do is visit our downloads page.