Join me in Canada for TechDays

The infamous Fall Travel Season is getting ready to kick into high gear, and first-up on my calendar is a trip to the Great White North for Microsoft TechDays Canada. In fact, I happen to be a National Session Lead for this year’s event, coordinating the “MVC for WebForms Programmers” session. TechDays will be hosted in 8 cities across Canada, starting with Vancouver next week and ending with Calgary in mid-December. I will be presenting at the kick-off stop in Vancouver next week week and then again in Halifax in early November. Most of the other stops will be covered by the talented Telerik Evangelist, Evan Hutnick.

While at TechDays, I’ll be doing two talks. First, obviously, the talk on MVC for WebForms Programmers will be a good intro session with practical tips designed to help long-time WebForms developers understand the transition to MVC. Second, I’ll be doing a “Power Talk” on Speeding Up Development Using 3rd Party Controls, featuring the Telerik Tools for Silverlight. We’ll look at how the RadControls for Silverlight are unlocking the power of the platform for LOB developers.

Oh! And as a great bonus for attending TechDays, Telerik will be giving RadControls for Silverlight licenses to all TechDays attendees! I’m not sure what it costs to attend TechDays, but I’d bet $1000 of complimentary software makes it a pretty good deal.

If you’re in Canada, register for TechDays now and come join Telerik (and me) as we travel across the country this fall!

Telerik wins Jolt Award for Best Application Library

It’s with great honor that I get to share with you that Telerik has been awarded the Dr.Dobb’s Jolt Product Excellence Award in the category of Application Libraries and Frameworks. This win recognizes the Telerik Premium Collection bundle, which as you know includes everything from the RadControls to OpenAccess ORM to JustCode, as the best collection of tools available for software development as determined by an experienced panel of expert industry judges.

This award is extra special because the Telerik Premium Collection was judged against all software libraries and frameworks- not just tools built for .NET. That means the Telerik tools were deemed the best tools for developers, period. Entries from a range of platforms, including .NET, Java, and who knows what else, were judged and Telerik came-out on top.

First, I want to again thank you, our active and loyal customers for continuing to give us the feedback that has helped us build definitive, industry-leading products! We work every day to make your lives easier and awards like this only serve to verify that we’re all moving in the right direction.

Second, I want to apologize to our non-.NET friends. Most of our tools target .NET very specifically, so we apologize that you will not be able to enjoy the best tools available for software development. Assuming you’re not ready to make the switch to .NET, hopefully you can enjoy some of our other tools like TeamPulse and WebUI Test Studio that are useful to .NET and non-.NET developers alike.

Enjoy working with best developer tools money can buy and don’t forget to vote for them in the Community Choice Awards this week!

Q3 2010 Road Maps showing you the future (update)

Long-time Telerik customers know that the value of a Telerik subscription extends far beyond the high quality tools we ship, encompassing industry leading support, constantly updated training materials, and an aggressive release cycle that continues to deliver three major releases every year! While some companies continue to charge more while offering less, and .NET framework components evolve at “framework speed,” Telerik innovates quickly to deliver more value in a year than virtually any other software tools vendor. And now that Q2 and the first round of service packs are behind us, it’s time to start looking ahead to the final release of 2010.

Q3 2010 is once again shaping-up to be a huge release. It’s becoming a bit cliché at this point to tout a release as “huge,” but there’s really no other way to describe our Q releases as each subsequent release delivers more updates to more products. To help you start planning for what’s next, we’ve started to publish the Q3 2010 Road Maps for many of the Telerik products.

I’ll provide direct links to the Road Maps below, but first, some cool highlights from what we’ve revealed so far:

• AJAX
  • 2 New Controls: TreeList and Button (richer versions of ASP’s LinkButton, ImageButton, and Button)
  • RadCalendar: New Range Selection feature
  • RadAsyncUpload: New Inline progress indicator
• MVC
  • New Controls: TimePicker and DateTimePicker
  • Grid: Many enhancements, including Column Reordering
  • Accessibility improvements + some exciting secret work
• WinForms
  • New Control: RadCommandBar (will replace RadToolStrip)
  • RadGridView: Adding support for ORM hierarchy, event-based hierarchy
  • RadScheduler: Adding in-place editors + Time Zones support
• Silverlight
  • New RIA Data Source control (for even easier Silverlight data binding)
  • New XAP Optimizer! (improved version of today’s Assembly Minifier)
  • New Sparklines (for “inline” data visualization)
  • RadChart: Adding Drill-down and Interactivity features
  • New Theme: Expression Dark! (inspired by Blend)
• ORM [UPDATED]
  • [Updated: As can happen when looking in to the future, the road map for OpenAccess ORM has changed slightly since the original post.]
  • New LinqToSql converter (to help you transition from “dead” L2S to OpenAccess)
  • Improved Schema updates, WCF Data Service generation
  • New Database Support: Postgres
• Reporting
  • Adding XML Report Serialization and Extended report interactivity (sorting, drill-down for table items)
• TeamPulse
  • Adding TFS 2010 bi-directional sync

Exciting? Yes. For now, try to stay focused and productive with the Q2 2010 bits and start making time for the Q3 2010 launch this November. You can find full road map details using the links below.

Road Maps

• RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
• RadControls for WinForms
• RadControls for Silverlight / WPF
• Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC
• Telerik Reporting
• Telerik OpenAccess ORM
• JustCode [not yet updated for Q3]
• JustMock [not yet available]

Vote for Telerik in 2010 Community Choice Awards

It’s that time again for you to tell the world about the great products you use from Telerik. Voting for the 2010 DevProConnections Community Choice Awards is open now and Telerik is nominated in 16 of the total 26 categories! While it’s great to take home awards like our recent Best of TechEd 2010 trophy, there is something unique about letting the voters on the Interwebs determine your fate.

What do you need to do? Vote today!

And then remind your co-workers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, DNUG members, and anyone else you see to vote in this year’s awards, too. To help you successfully cast your ballot for Telerik’s nominations this year, here is a quick voting guide for the categories where you’ll find us:

• Category (Telerik Product)
• Add-In (Telerik JustCode)
• Charting & Graphics Tool (Telerik RadChart for ASP.NET AJAX)
• Community Resource (Telerik’s Community )
• Component Set (Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX)
• Content Management System (Telerik Sitefinity Web CMS)
• Grid (Telerik RadGrid for ASP.NET AJAX)
• Navigation Control (Telerik RadMenu for ASP.NET AJAX)
• Online Editor (Telerik RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX)
• Printing/Reporting Tool (Telerik Reporting)
• Project Management/Defect Tracking (Telerik TeamPulse)
• Scheduling/Calendar Tool (Telerik RadScheduler for ASP.NET AJAX)
• Silverlight Product (Telerik RadControls for Silverlight)
• Testing/QA Tool (Telerik WebUI Test Studio)
• Training (Telerik Training)
• Utility (Telerik OpenAccess ORM)
• Free Tool (Telerik OpenAccess ORM Express)

Vote in the DevProConnections Community Choice Awards. (Voting closes September 21st.)