Telerik blogs
The Q4 release finally went live last Friday! It was our hardest, but also our best release so far. We added 5 new controls to the suite (upload, input, calendar, window, toolbar), released major updates for r.a.d.grid and r.a.d.combobox, extended the in-built AJAX support of most products, and on top of that, we were on the front line with full support for Visual Studio 2005.

Here's a link to the complete news release: http://www.telerik.com/Default.aspx?PageId=1861&b21ActiveNewsId=bBj&b21CategoryId=drh

I am particularly thrilled by r.a.d.grid 3.0. and r.a.d.window. The latter offers some unique capabilities and is a great addition to the r.a.d.controls suite as it allows developers to easily build applications with windowing capabilities similar to those of desktop apps. As to r.a.d.grid 3.0.... well, the examples are worth a thousand words:) We are using r.a.d.grid very extensively in our internal systems and over the weekend we upgraded everything to v3.0 and I am pretty happy with the extra capabilities, especially the AJAX scrolling and the new filtering capabilities. Now I can work with 30,000 records intelligently and my browser doesn't crash when I try to load them on the client:)

The Q4 release also marked a cornerstone in our new QA strategy - most of our products were much better covered with tests than previous releases and we hope customers won't experience many "unexpected" problemos. The next step ahead of us in this aspect is to further increase code coverage and to automate some of the manual testing that our QAs do at the moment. At present we are experimenting with Visual Studio Team System but it seems to be a big bite to swallow:)

The positive stuff aside, there were some omissions on our end in Q4 that we will need to resolve soon. The first one was documentation - we have added lots of new content and we've improved the descriptions in the API, but nonetheless things are far from what we (internally) and customers expect. The second thing that wasn't really smart to do was to package the .NET 1.x and .NET 2.0 versions of all r.a.d.controls in a single installer. The effect - now the r.a.d.controls download is a "humble" 118MB:( It wasn't smart, but it's better to have a working but not optimal solution, rather than to make changes in the last moment and release something buggy. The Eric Sink blog on this is very convincing.

The good news is that we understand we didn't go in the right direction and we're working on it. We plan to re-work the quick start framework a bit and reduce the download significantly. We are also working on an update of all docs in the next month or so.

Have fun with Q4! I hope you'll have a great time and you will like all of the new things. In case you don't, make sure you tell us what can be done better:)

vassil_terziev
About the Author

Vassil Terziev

As Chief Innovation Officer at Progress, Vassil Terziev is responsible for identifying growth strategies and new market opportunities, as well as promoting internal innovation.

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