Has a Telerik Customer for over 2 years now, I now know what to expect from new releases. A lot of Changes and Backwards incompatibilities. Telerik continues to remove properties, methods, change how controls work, renaming properties like the Image to ImageUrl without persisting the old ones for a while.
I'm not saying this changes shouldn't happen, but I believe that they should happen progressively without causing a complete breakdown of a project after an upgrade. Like I wrote on a support ticket, I managed to convert as asp.net 1.1 project into a 2.0 project without these kind of breaks that we have with Telerik controls. Every upgrade is the same old story. Endless hours fixing code. For instance, why did you remove the Title property from the DockingZone object? Did you consider that it could be in use by someone? I know that I can have the same property using Attributes["Title"] but the thing is that I had to change a lot of code because of that. Another amusing change is the property Image to ImageUrl just because it sounds better and makes more sense. I agree, but you should have left the old property for some time so that we could change that without breaking the code.
In a project where we use 5 controls, upgrading to a new release has always been a nightmare because we know that the next week will be just for code fix. The worst thing is, the faulty releases with bugs that only exist because probably no intense testing was made to the controls. Has I'm writing, RadTreeview has a bug where checking a checkbox with AutoPostBack=true and AutoPostBackOnCheck=false causes a postback. How can this happen in a final release? Of course, I just found that the problem wasn't mine after a lost day and finally a support ticket in a total of 1 day and a half lost for this issue.
This kind of errors has soon has they are discovered by Telerik, should be reported in the control Forum so that everyone could know what to expect. The first thing I did after detecting the problem was look for an answer in the forum but with no success. If there was a Telerik Latest Bugs Topic for each control, I'm sure that it would help developers a lot.
Telerik must understand that it's important for us, developers to trust in new releases and not be concerned about the number of days we will have ahead to fixe hundreds of lines once again. That is no way to work. You should be aware of this, and ensure backwards compatibility.
I speak for my self, but I would rather have a one year release without any breaking changes and without bugs. It would be fantastic to just copy the new files over the old ones with everything working.
Curiously, I found some properties where you show a warning of "property deprecated" showing the new property to use. This would be perfect if you didn't transform that property to a readonly, breaking the code anyway and not allowing the developer to change to the new property over time.
Microsoft did that with the 2.0 Framework. A lot of methods changed, but the old ones still where working with a warning in the compiler telling you to change to the new one. That is the way to go.
I hope you take this has a positive critique and keep up the good work.
I'm not saying this changes shouldn't happen, but I believe that they should happen progressively without causing a complete breakdown of a project after an upgrade. Like I wrote on a support ticket, I managed to convert as asp.net 1.1 project into a 2.0 project without these kind of breaks that we have with Telerik controls. Every upgrade is the same old story. Endless hours fixing code. For instance, why did you remove the Title property from the DockingZone object? Did you consider that it could be in use by someone? I know that I can have the same property using Attributes["Title"] but the thing is that I had to change a lot of code because of that. Another amusing change is the property Image to ImageUrl just because it sounds better and makes more sense. I agree, but you should have left the old property for some time so that we could change that without breaking the code.
In a project where we use 5 controls, upgrading to a new release has always been a nightmare because we know that the next week will be just for code fix. The worst thing is, the faulty releases with bugs that only exist because probably no intense testing was made to the controls. Has I'm writing, RadTreeview has a bug where checking a checkbox with AutoPostBack=true and AutoPostBackOnCheck=false causes a postback. How can this happen in a final release? Of course, I just found that the problem wasn't mine after a lost day and finally a support ticket in a total of 1 day and a half lost for this issue.
This kind of errors has soon has they are discovered by Telerik, should be reported in the control Forum so that everyone could know what to expect. The first thing I did after detecting the problem was look for an answer in the forum but with no success. If there was a Telerik Latest Bugs Topic for each control, I'm sure that it would help developers a lot.
Telerik must understand that it's important for us, developers to trust in new releases and not be concerned about the number of days we will have ahead to fixe hundreds of lines once again. That is no way to work. You should be aware of this, and ensure backwards compatibility.
I speak for my self, but I would rather have a one year release without any breaking changes and without bugs. It would be fantastic to just copy the new files over the old ones with everything working.
Curiously, I found some properties where you show a warning of "property deprecated" showing the new property to use. This would be perfect if you didn't transform that property to a readonly, breaking the code anyway and not allowing the developer to change to the new property over time.
Microsoft did that with the 2.0 Framework. A lot of methods changed, but the old ones still where working with a warning in the compiler telling you to change to the new one. That is the way to go.
I hope you take this has a positive critique and keep up the good work.