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Fix The Documentation

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Let's talk about telerik (the good and the bad)
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Jeff
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Jeff asked on 13 Mar 2014, 11:51 PM
Stop relying on the forums to document your products. Write proper documentation covering all functionality, we certainly paid enough for it.

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Stefan
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answered on 14 Mar 2014, 04:32 PM
Hello Jeff,

We have answered this inquiry in the other forum thread you have posted on: http://www.telerik.com/forums/how-telerik-derailed-my-project.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Regards,
Stefan
Telerik
 

DevCraft Q1'14 is here! Watch the online conference to see how this release solves your top-5 .NET challenges. Watch on demand now.

 
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dandv
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answered on 30 Dec 2014, 04:15 AM
Jeff, while better documentation is great, the fact that Telerik makes documentation editable directly on GitHub via PRs is a big step forward, compared to, for example, Webix.

While a surprisingly nice UI components library given its age (launched in July 2013), the Webix documentation is riddled with typos and broken links, and has no easy mechanism for users to submit corrections.
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Kelso
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answered on 23 Feb 2015, 02:56 PM
Frankly the documentation is horrid, and extremely disappointing. Telerik offers some of the best functionality I have seen in a product of this type, but the documentation is getting to the point of not being useful, and likely the cause of most of the frustration when trying to use Telerik. For example. 

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc/grid/foreignkeycolumn

This is the way to do dropdowns in grids. however this documentation does not have the methods in the controller to make it work those are found here

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc/grid/editing-custom

And even in this demo they have methods that are not even used. For example PopulateEmployees() is never used, and service no purpose in the demo.

Also, the DataView["categories"] is never used in the view, it actually applies to the demo for the ForeignKey Example in the first link that I posted. In this example it is only used to populate the default value, which does not work because the ForeignKey column is not present in the example.

This is the kind of thing that makes developers waste time trying to figure out how to make your products work. You currently have a potentially very useful product, however if I have to spend hours trying to work out the issues in your documentation to make your tools work as they should, I would be further ahead making my own tools, or writing everything by hand because you save me no time. This is completely unacceptable, you need to implement some serious quality control on your documentation and rework all of your demos so that they are CLEAR, CONCISE , and TRANSPARENT in ALL syntax. Meaning that your controllers have all of the code and models used in the Demo, no shortcuts and nothing that should not be there. Without this standard, you will not keep my business, that I can assure you, and will not stay ahead of your competition, which are quickly catching up, and have far better more detailed and accurate documentation.
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dandv
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answered on 24 Feb 2015, 07:38 PM
While I haven't worked with Telerik since December and can't knowledgeably comment on the quality of the documentation, I *would* like to give an update on my post back then.

Since December, Webix has put their documentation on GitHub, https://github.com/webix-hub/docs

They've been accepting every single one of my pull requests, and soon I won't be the one submitting corrections.

Telerik would be well advise to keep up with the competition.
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Let's talk about telerik (the good and the bad)
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Stefan
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Kelso
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