2009 in review

When you don't blog regularly, one of the biggest challenges is to find a good topic. With Twitter around, it becomes even more complicated for the people that are not regular bloggers. While I was waiting for something interesting to pop-up as a topic, 2009 almost passed and it gave me the needed opportunity. It feels as if I blinked and it's Christmas Season again.
 
Before I move on with my overview, on behalf of everyone at Telerik, I would like to wish you and your families a better 2010 – stay healthy, happy and lucky. Thank you for being a part of the Telerik community and for bearing with us in good times and in bad
 
2009 was not an easy year – all of us, in differing severity, felt the hit of the economic slowdown that affected most of the world. It was the first time we as a business had to take into consideration macro factors and not just the things that are typically within our control. Yet, it was also an amazing time – in terms of new experiences and results achieved. Luckily, with the efforts of all the talented people at Telerik and with your incredible support, we overcame all challenges and emerged stronger – with more and better products and ready to “deliver more than expected” in 2010 and beyond.
 
Even though this year had a lot of economic uncertainty all around, we still accomplished almost everything on our roadmap plus a few extra things: 

• Introduced the Telerik ASP.NET MVC Extensions. Contrary to popular belief, the MVC extensions were not a port of our ASP.NET AJAX products but a new development started from the ground up. It was also the first time we released a Telerik product under an open source license (using GPL 2.0).
• Telerik significantly extended the Silverlight and WPF product lines. Today, we have an amazing set of controls with which you can create pretty much any type of application. After the initial rush to provide features, we spent a lot of time to also deliver unmatched performance. It was a big engineering challenge but a good investment. I won’t go into controversy who’s grid is the fastest – you can test everything on the market and see which product performs fastest in your case.
• We were the first to provide support for Microsoft Silverlight 4.0. It shows how committed we are to closely following Microsoft releases and allowing you to leverage the latest and greatest products coming from Microsoft and not lose the productivity you get from our tools.
• We brought to market the first Silverlight reporting engine by virtue of extending Telerik Reporting capabilities.
• Our mature product lines, RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and WinForms, got many new controls and performance improvements, as well as much better looking skins. We also spent several months to ensure that all controls are much more easily styled and to provide tools for customers to make customizations to the skins visually – that’s how the Visual Style Builder was born. And we are in the final stages of revamping the WinForms Visual Style Builder.
• OpenAccess got many improvements and is getting closer to our vision for the product. In 2009 we focused on providing really broad LINQ support and the close to 200 tests (101 LINQ examples is just a small subset) is a true testament that we have one of the most feature-rich and LINQ capable solutions on the market.
• At PDC 2009 we released our first Visual Studio productivity plug-in “JustCode”. While JustCode is not as feature complete as the tools of our competitors, it shows our commitment to this space and it does deliver quite a few unique features such as solution-wide code analysis, JavaScript refactoring, and many others. Oh, and it’s much much lighter on your machine’s memory.
• This year we also shipped the Work Item Manager and Dashboard. Developed in partnership with Imaginet, these tools were intended mainly for internal purposes but everyone was so excited that we finally decided to offer them as a free download to our customers. It’s a great showcase of Telerik WPF technology put to heavy-duty use. And it’s useful as it makes working with VSTS more enjoyable.
• In 2009 we also managed to enter into a strategic partnership with ArtOfTest and our WebUI Test Studio product was born. Apart from selling it, we are also using it extensively across our teams for ASP.NET AJAX, MVC and Silverlight test automation (in addition to our unit testing efforts of course:)
• We delivered the first truly accessible editor for SharePoint content editing. You can take a look at the RNIB case study on YouTube. It’s a great case how technology can help for something good.

We are extremely proud of every single item but the really important questions is not how we feel about our products, but instead how you feel about them? Did we get better? Did we deliver the value that you expected? Did we add the tools you wanted to see from us? Please share your feedback below and help us serve you better in the year to come.