Telerik on Windows 7 Beta – The Complete Overview

For those of you that follow my TelerikWatch blog, you know that I recently made the jump to Windows 7 on my primary workstation (build 7000, to be exact). I’ve spent the weekend installing, tweaking, and testing the latest iteration of Windows, and like Vassil before me, my impressions are generally positive. Microsoft has definitely worked hard to ensure the compatibility nightmares of the XP to Vista jump are not repeated with Windows 6.1 7. I’m confident I’ll be able to use Windows 7- even in beta form- reliably as my full-time OS from this point forward.

As far as Telerik is concerned, all lights are green. I have successfully installed all of Telerik’s products on Windows 7:

• RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (2008.3.1314)
• RadControls for WinForms (2008.3.1321)
• RadControls for WPF (2008.3.1217)
• RadControls for Silverlight (2008.3.1217)
• Telerik Reporting (2008.3.1402)
• Telerik OpenAccess ORM (2008.3.1327.2)
• Telerik WebUI Test Studio Beta

My environment is running VS 2008 SP1 and SQL Express 2008. All of the installers ran without error and behaved as expected. I did have some challenges running the installers at first, but a quick reboot of Windows 7 cleared the problem. If you have challenges with Windows 7 beta (really for installing anything), I suggest you first try re-running the installer as “admin” and then, if that fails, try rebooting and installing again. That’s worked for me for just about everything.

The ASP.NET AJAX, WinForms, WPF, Reporting, and OpenAccess installers all add their Visual Studio toolbox items and Visual Studio menus without problem. The OpenAccess and Telerik Reporting installers also installed their test databases (NorthwindOA and AdventureWorks, respectively) on SQL Express 2008 without problem.

The story carries over for design-time experience, too. The Telerik Reporting designer and wizards work without issue. The OpenAccess wizards and dialogs work without issue. And, of course, Telerik’s brand-new WebUI Test Studio test recorder and playback work. One important thing to remember is that you need to run Visual Studio as “admin” for all features to work. For instance, you may see a permissions error when trying to preview a Telerik Report in Visual Studio unless you are running as admin. Otherwise, no surprises.

CONCLUSION

Windows 7 beta is definitely not perfect- not yet- but it is very stable and very compatible with existing software. If you want to start working with Windows 7 beta, you will not experience any significant problems using it with Telerik’s tool. You can confidently develop on Windows 7 beta with all of Telerik’s tools and you can confidently deploy applications to Windows 7 beta built with Telerik’s components.

Don’t count our support as “official” yet- we’ll wait for Windows 7 release versions before dubbing our support official- but hopefully this overview will help you know what you can expect if you start working with Win7 early. And in short, you can expect good things when comes to Telerik and the Windows 7 beta.