DevExpress Universal v21.2 released

It’s that time of the year – time for our second major release of 2021. A couple of days ago we officially released v21.2 and introduced enhancements and new features across the whole of our .NET/JavaScript product portfolio (including updates to the following subscriptions/product lines: WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET/MVC, Blazor, DevExtreme, Reports, BI Dashboards, XAF, and Office File API). As is usual, however, the new version of our VCL Subscription will be released in a couple of weeks' time.

For a complete list of what’s new in this release, please check out devexpress.com/new. This particular cycle is also of major importance in that Microsoft are due to publish the release candidates for both Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 within a few days, and obviously our teams have been adding new functionality and features to support them both (and making sure everything continued to work as we progressed through the beta cycle).

Important features, at least from my viewpoint, include:

• Support for HTML/CSS templates in various WinForms controls
• Support for Windows 11 in WinForms and WPF
• A Heat Map control for both WinForms and WPF
• Accessible PDF support across the board, and in fact we’ve done a lot for accessibility throughout this release
• Dashboard, Rich Text Editor, DropDown control, and a major set of features for the new Grid, all for Blazor
• Talking of Blazor, our cross-platform .NET app development product, XAF, is deepening its support for it in leaps and bounds
• So many improvements to our reporting suite that it’s hard to select even one or two to point out, but we now have a Report Viewer for Blazor and for WinUI
• And of course, we’ve been doing a lot of work for .NET MAUI.

But, just to reiterate, this list was a deliberately sparse selection of the many new enhancements we’ve done for v21.2. You really should visit the What’s New page to see the full list.

As usual, we’ve listed the Resolved Issues introduced in this release from the latest version of the previous major release. That page also enables you to review the changes we’ve made from any release to any other.

Unfortunately, for every major release, no matter how hard we try and minimize the impact, some new features and enhancements are bound to cause a few breaking changes. You can read about the v20.1 breaking changes here, although one major one for our web-based products was ending support for Internet Explorer 11.

I pretty much say something like this with every major release: we would not be able to produce and release such robust and full-featured controls, features, and enhancements without the invaluable help of you, our customers. By publishing surveys, reviewing comments and support tickets, we find that we can more easily focus on providing what our customers want from our products going forward. Also, you may have noticed that we’ve been publishing relevant blog posts on what we are doing, posts detailing various tips and tricks, and posts on how we aim to move forward. My strong recommendation is to monitor our community site more than ever before.

I’d like to thank everyone who provided feedback on our products throughout this year, who used and tested the various v21.2 betas we've produced and provided information on the issues they found, and, of course, to all our customers who use our products every day in their applications. We are confident that the new controls, features, and enhancements in v21.2 will strengthen and validate your trust in our products. Thank you, it is much appreciated.

Free DevExpress Products - Get Your Copy Today