Greetings everyone,
With the brand new look-and-feel of telerik.com we introduced for the landmark Q3 2008 release you probably noticed that the support resources searching capabilities have changed, too. Our aim was to expose intuitive and straight-forward means to browse the available resources based on their type and find the information/examples you need in a blink of an eye. In a nutshell, we would like each visitor to have the ability to search by product line and get a list of results with a leading indicator image designating the resource type (demo, help topic, knowledge base article, code library project, etc.).
Since a well-organized set of screen shots speaks for itself, let's get to the point and explain some of the options you have when looking for some piece of information/code example concerning a particular implementation of yours.
The first step is to go to the 'Support' section on telerik.com:
From there you can choose a specific product line you are interested in:
For our simple test let's choose 'ASP.NET AJAX Controls'. We will be instantly navigated to the following section:
where one can choose to browse the resources for our ASP.NET AJAX controls in general, a particular RadControl or explore all support resources for a given product line/specific control based on their type (see the 'Or, just check...' panel in the screen shot).
Here is the place to note that this page (as well as the pages for individual controls sources) have unified appearance/sections. This means that once the end user gets familiar with the layout of a single search page, he/she will be able to navigate quite easily through an arbitrary control support page from a product line of his/her choice. Pretty useful, eh?!
Back to the main subject - let's type 'performance' in the input field at the top and press the 'Search' button beside it. Here are the results returned by the filter criteria we just entered (having a slick icon in front of each entry that indicates the actual type of the resource):
Worth to mention is that there is a helpful panel in the right section of the result page which allows you to filter the listed items by their type if you would like to enforce an additional filtering rule and limit the results array.
Now, what if I would like to get some information about a concrete control? This has never been that easy as it is currently. Simply navigate back to the support home page with the product lines and drill down as deep as you want to go. For example, let's choose 'ASP.NET AJAX controls' -> Menu:
You will be directed to the page below:
As you can see, the most important sources are listed at the top (Demos, Online Help, Step-by-step tutorial) followed by 'Recent Tips' and 'Popular resources' modules in which the content is gathered based on the principle "What you should know about [RadControl]" and grouped by categories. Naturally, you have the well-known search facility concerned previously in this post (together with the filter panel at the right side) and just for better visualization I am providing a screen shot from a quick search after entering 'menu item' in the input area:
Additionally, you are free to use (and abuse :)) the stand-alone search options in the demos, online documentation, knowledge base, code library and forums available in previous versions as well:
An entire universe of search capabilities created to make the life of the developer easier, don't you think?! Which option would you prefer or find best?
Happy searching and happy holidays!
Stefan’s main interests outside the .NET domain include rock music, playing the guitar and swimming.