Syncfusion released Essential Studio for WinRT beta, which provides enterprise class controls for building Windows Store applications. It includes 20 controls including the ability to read and write Excel, Word and PDF documents with XlsIO, DocIO and PDF controls.
The chart control includes over 20 chart types such as line, area, bar, bubble, column, candle, hi-lo, hi-lo-open-close, polar, pie, radar, range area, range column, scatter, stacking column, stacking bar, stacking area, histogram, spline, and spline area series. It also includes specialized financial charts with 10 technical indicators for visualizing trends in financial data and incorporates DirectX rendering to deliver the best possible performance.
The diagram control enables you to draw UML diagrams and workflows with the help of touch gestures such as selecting, rotating, dragging, zooming, and panning directly from the WinRT enabled device. It also provides an ability to validate workflows by enforcing business rules.
On the other hand, the maps control enables you to display data as a map with heapmaps and bubbles including the ability to customize marker shape by specifying a data template. The control renders ESRI shapefiles which is the recognized file format for storing map data.
In addition to the above mentioned controls, the suite also includes Gauge, Radial Menu, Cover Flow, Tab Control, Hub Tile, Date Picker, Time Picker, Rating, Tile View, Range Slider, Extended Text Box, Numeric Text Box, Domain Up-Down and Numeric Up-Down controls, which are optimized for touch and supports common gestures such as zooming, panning, selecting, double-tapping, rotating and resizing.
Miguel Goncalves, a prospective developer created an app using WinRT controls but it doesn't pass the windows app certification kit. He posted the error message in detail on the official product forum.
Stephen Jebaraj of Syncfusion in his reply observed the following
We are able to see the problem with XlsIO and DocIO and will have a fix available as soon as possible.
Moreover, Stephen also provided a temporary solution which enabled Miguel to pass the certification kit for his app.
According to Daniel Jebaraj, Vice President, Syncfusion, Essential Studio for WinRT can be used to build go live apps and product updates will be released frequently by incorporating the suggestions from the community and bug fixes.