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Hey,

I was wondering if anyone knows of or uses a good, inexpensive web service to send SMS messages to cellphones in the US.

Thank you in advance,
Oleg Fridman

A couple years ago when I was evaluating ASP.NET control suites I looked at two vendors very closely -- Telerik and Infragistics. The high level summary goes something like this -- at the time the Infragistics controls were plentiful, but lacked the polish and quality of the Telerik offering. So I made the logical decision and purchased the Telerik suite. During my first year of ownership I noticed a few things that were very impressive to me:

1. A published product roadmap. Web developers today are asked to really push the limits of the web browser, and it is helpful to know about new features so we can prepare to take advantage of everything offered in new releases. Those of us with demanding customers and site visitors need to stay one step ahead of requests.
2. Telerik appeared to be focused on their ASP.NET control suite.
3. Releases appeared on or within days of the posted dates. There is nothing so fun as release day when we can dive in to the new fixes and features!
4. New releases appear to have a limited number of bugs. Very nice. Replace a few files on the development sites and after minimal code changes and testing move to production.
5. The support staff monitor the forums very closely and respond to discussions directly and with the detail needed to answer specific questions.
6. Support incidents are answered quickly. From time to time I have even received assistance on issues that might be viewed as outside the support responsibility of Telerik.
7. Customer communications is fantastic. Customer surveys and a willingness to listen to customer comments and concerns in an effort to continually improve. Oh, and not only do they accept feedback, they act on it (improvements to the forums and to the product line).

Renewing my Telerik subscription for another year was a no-brainer. During the second year of ownership I have noticed a few changes. As with just about everything in life, some things stay the same, some things change for the worse, and other things improve. I am sure these changes have very good reasons behind them, I list them here mainly because these are the things that have set Telerik apart from other companies:

1. The product roadmap was not updated as frequently and did not provide the same level of insight in to the next release. Perhaps to allow for some competitive advantage? Perhaps because the project managers are not in-tune with what the developers can accomplish during the development stage, and it is easier to remove features from the list when the customer doesn't know it was originally due for the release.
2. Telerik no longer appears to be focused on any one product. As an outsider who knows nothing about the inner workings of their organization, it appears that they are trying to do too much with too little -- stretching themselves too thin in an effort to be everything to everyone. Don't get me wrong, I would likely use the other products they create if they are included in without extra licensing, but if I really needed something solid I would find myself evaluating a best of breed product.
3. Releases have not appeared by the published dates. I have witnessed quite a few development companies go through this same scenario... Start with the intension of being very open, then they have a few problems and miss a date here and there and start to get complaints from customers. The result of sharing release dates with customers and not meeting the dates is no more specific release dates. It is easier to hit a release date of the second half of a month than it is to hit an actual date. What happens when the estimated release dates are missed? No release dates at all. This isn't a huge deal, and it has happened to a lot of companies. More times than not Telerik used to hit their more specific release dates.
4. Releases appear to have more bugs, and are often followed by multiple service packs. I am a developer and understand that all software has bugs. Every line of code in every new feature presents a possible bug. So, I would rather have a service pack to fix issues than have to wait for the next major release. I also understand that if a company were to wait to release a product until there were "zero bugs" that the software would never be released.
5. I have noticed that frequently someone in the community attempts to answer most customer questions before Telerik chimes in with their input. This may simply be caused by the fact that the community is in and out of the forums 24 hours a day, and Telerik works normal business hours. Perhaps others attempting to answer questions in a community setting like this fees Telerik up to focus on official support tickets and development. As a customer I value the Telerik follow-up comments more than those of Intermediate, Master, or MVP customers.
6. I have not witnessed any significant changes to the level of support provided, and that is a good thing.
7. Telerik continues to look for ways to improve.

I don't want to get in to a feature comparison here -- we all know that Telerik has some products and features that Infragistics doesn't and vise versa. My thought is that I haven't seen anything from Telerik to show me that they are working to be a leader with their current offerings. The reporting and Windows form products are in its early stages, and it is hard to see where Telerik plans to take these products. Can the Telerik organization realistically handle developing and supporting all of the new products they have created (Reporting, Windows Controls, SiteFinity), and continue to provide the same level of quality and service we have come to expect in previous years? Is the Telerik product line expanding faster than they are? Are they attempting to research, develop, market, and support too many products in a too short a period of time?

I am a happy Telerik customer and my interaction with the company has been largely positive. So much so that I actually want to see them succeed (as opposed to not caring either way). As far as I can tell, Infragistics has been very busy playing catch-up, and they are really challenging the Telerik product lines. Taking another look at these two vendors today makes me wonder if Telerik is loosing the edge they had in product focus, quality, and feature-set.

I built an ASP.NET 2.0 web site in my computer which has about 30 web pages.

I needed to use ( latest version ) only in the last page.

So I created a web site with just one page to test the “ASP.NET Ajax-Enabled Web Site” code of this page separately before integrating it with the previous big web site which is based simply on ASP.NET.

Both web sites work fine separately but when I added the web page with the code and also the modified web.config, it messed up the CSS formats( coded in the AB.css file )  on all Web controls  that use the CssClass property. As result of that the text appears only with its default attributes with big black character founts which destroy the aesthetics and organization of the pages.

Here is a simple code example where the this problem appears:

<asp:Label ID="usernameLb"  CssClass="Test" runat="server" ></asp:Label>

And here is its CSS code ( inside a “.css” file ) :

.Test

{

  position:absolute;

  left:450px;

  top:110px;

  z-index:3;

  color: #0000ff;

  font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica;

  font-size: 15px;

  font-weight: normal;

}

What could be the cause ?

( my OS is windows XP prof and I am using Visual Studio 2005 and IE 6 )

 

CSS Adviser is tackling common CSS problems:
http://www.adobe.com/go/cssadvisor

Check it out!

Hi
Im running on Win 2003 64BIT my Q is dose the product can run on this systems ?

Hello,

After adding a control to my asp.net page I am getting Compilation Error 2000. Can someone told me why it is happening?

kb

http://www.egmcartech.com/2006/08/02/honda-prints-phone-sex-number-owner-manuals-by-mistake

 

I've been searching around on the web for this for quite a while now, and thus far have come up empty-handed.  I have a page that has a checkbox and a dropdown list, among other things.  The idea is to disable the dropdown if the checkbox is checked, as it more or less makes the dropdown selection irrelevant.  And, this needs to be done without a postback.  The page uses a master-page, which contains the <head> tags, and thus any javascript functions.  I have writtin this function in there:
and tie it in through the pageload in vb thus:

I think the javascript function is calling, but the object references seem to be failing.  I'm as yet unaware of any way to actually debug my javascript, so I'm groping more or less blindly.

Anyone have any ideas?

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