The Results of Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX Product Survey and the Q2 2013 Roadmap They Helped Us Shape

In January this year we ran a survey among our customers and thanks to you being so active, we collected very useful information about how you use RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and how you would like the product to evolve in the future. For example, these few important facts were confirmed:

Important Fact #1

Modern browsers, i.e. the ones that support HTML5, are already adopted by most of your end users. 9 out of 10 users browse through the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.

Important Fact #2

Leveraging HTML5 features is getting more important for you. The adoption of the “modern browsers” naturally unties our hands to use more and more HTML5 and CSS3 features and makes us all want to gain all the benefits from the new technologies.

Important Fact #3

Performance in terms of stability, as well as faster server and client responsiveness is as important for you, if not more, than having new features and controls.

Interesting Suggestions for New Controls

The new features and controls suggested are also interesting. Some of them have been already requested a few times through different channels. Others we learned about for the first time and included in our backlog. These include controls like Wizard, Client DataSource, FormView, Syntax Highlighter, Lightbox, etc.

What I was surprised to see was the multiple requests for different stuff that we already have, such as listbox with checkboxes, progress indicator, accordion, control that makes it easy to change skins, gauges, date picker, lookup field.

Anyways, the important thing is that your feedback and answers helped us make a few important decisions and shape the next release roadmap. Thank you all for being so kind to participate in the survey and spend a few minutes of your time to help us build a better product.

2013 Plans Based on the Survey Results

A list of all major items scheduled for Q2 2013 is already available on our roadmap page, but here are the highlights.

We will not stop supporting old IE versions like IE6, IE7, and IE8. Although a very small number, some of your clients are still using these browsers and we will make sure we provide the same experience for them as for the people using modern browsers.

Performance, in all its aspects, will be the focus of our efforts. We will do our best to provide controls that are more and more stable. We plan to improve the components so they react faster both on the server and the client. We are also working on a new rendering mode to leverage HTML5 and load some HTML and CSS burden off.

Mobile/Touch devices support. It’s been around 3 years since we first started adding improvements here and there to provide support for mobile devices. Ever since then we have been including this as a story in every single roadmap and it’s been so long that it’s almost became funny. As if we don’t have anything else to do and we are just filling the time till the next release with it ;) What we were filling actually was the gap between desktop and touch devices to make your app work both places without you writing any further code.

New controls and new features for existing controls requested by you. As for the new control we are going to develop next Q, this will be the highly-anticipated TileList that will help you leverage the modern Windows 8 look and feel.

You Shape Our Roadmap

Our roadmap was always driven by our customers and most of the features are in the suite because you needed them and suggested them. We already have a decent list of new suggestions, but I would like to encourage you to share your needs at our feedback portal. And vote for the items there to climb them up ;)