A new edition of Telerik’s RadControls UI component suite features a native Silverlight report viewer, automates Silverlight UI testing, and has an object-relational mapping tool for Microsoft’s SQL Azure cloud service platform. The suite became available today.

RadControls Q3 2009 has updated controls throughout the suite, but Telerik placed most of its emphasis on Silverlight and business scenarios, said Todd Anglin, the company’s chief evangelist.

A Silverlight report viewer renders and displays documents in XAML, Anglin said. It also provides a print capability, which Silverlight 3.0 lacks. “If Microsoft adds platform-level generic printing support to Silverlight, it’s not a breaking change,” he said.

An automated UI testing tool for Silverlight allows developers to generate tests that are saved as standard Microsoft unit testing projects in Visual Studio, Anglin said. The tests can be made a build check-in requirement for Visual Studio Team System 2010, he added.

Visual Studio Extensions for RadControls for Silverlight now assist developers in automating the creation, upgrading and configuration of Telerik Silverlight projects, according to the company.

Telerik has also begun to roll out controls for Microsoft’s ASP.NET model-view-controller (MVC) framework in the form of a grid component.

“The framework makes it difficult to do a good reusable grid,” Anglin said. The grid is built on top of Telerik’s open-source MVC extensions. Those extensions, released in August, are now in beta, and are designed to make it easier for developers to work with UI modules that are based on the jQuery library.

Further, the release targets Microsoft’s SQL Azure with an object-relational mapping tool called OpenAccess, which enables developers to map a cloud database to .NET application classes, or to write classes and then have OpenAccess create a database in SQL Azure, Anglin said.

Other changes in RadControls Q3 2009 include additional ASP.NET controls and better-performing Windows Forms controls, he said. Telerik has also released a tool to make it easier for customers to update controls between its release cycles.

Pricing for the full RadControls Q3 2009 suite is US$1,299 per developer seat. The license grants 24-hour support, access to C# source code and free updates for one year.