Release Notes

[Stuart Hemming]

Can I just say that putting "Lots of bug fixes and improvements" in the release notes, even for an internal build is neither helpful or informative.

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Stuart

[sitefinitysteve]

lol, agreed :)

I saw that when I got the VS2010 popup, so I went into the release notes on the site hoping they were different.

FYI, Code Cleaner doesn't respect my braces formatting options

Although it hasn't borked any code yet, which is nice

[Stuart Hemming]

I was going to say "it's not big and it's not clever" but thought that that was silly. :-)

-- 
Stuart

[Stacey]

I agree completely. I was actually coming to the forum to post the same thing as Stuart. We appreciate the hard work, and the updated builds, but we're kind of in the dark about what was updated. 

I also don't like how JustCode isn't respecting my brace formatting, either, Steve - though I have been told this is being fixed in the upcoming Q1 of 2011 release. I don't know if this applies to the CodeCleaner or not.

[sitefinitysteve]

I just want to vent a little more in this thread

Ok great, we have a code cleaner and decompiler now...nice...but we still have a horrible parsing engine for double braces & quotes, and about the worst code templating engine I've ever used.

I think the problem is telerik management has these lofty release cycles (the Qs) and every product needs to have new shiny stuff implemented to show in the webinars and help sell licenses.  However the existing features don't ever seem to get updated.

Like we're getting the ability to share\store templates...nice...but building templates still makes me want to gouge my eyes out.  It's a constant battle of open the editor, make a change, test it out, open the editor, fix the problem, test it out, give up.  And god forbid you need to go back to modify a template and figure out the dogs breakfast of what it's doing.

CodeRush should be the benchmark for a template engine...do your best to beat that.  Way easier to use, better syntax, better designer.  How dollar signs can be used as a base object blows my mind, I mean jQuery is used almost everywhere and that blatantly conflicts with just about every javascript template you'd want to do.  (I think there's an escape character so it'll work though...but more code).  There's SO much potential for templates and integration with the ajax suite like the way WebAii has custom translators which knows about control features....but we get a compiler.

Examples:
1) Telerik Reporting, TERRIBLE rendering engine for PDFs....lines overlap, makes the resuting document look sloppy.  Been like that forever, fix on the horizon?....nope....but lets add more datasources!

2) WebAii Licensing: <scream>I hate having to register\unregister my work machine and laptop just to build a quick test!</scream>  Every other telerik product is per developer, and the Ultimate Collection is not cheap...I don't care if it's an agreement with WebAii or not, you at the very LEAST give me 2 active installs (work machine and home machine).  What do you think I'm going to do, torrent my license key or something?  I just want to run some unit tests when I get home.

3) Open Access Visual Designer: Pretty gimped (apparently to be fixed in Q1).  I have to have an entire unit test project dedicated to making sure minor model changes don't break other things.  You'd be AMAZED what gets picked up when you start running tests on the rLinq.  But with all the issues it has, someone spent time making an "SDK"...why...why needed this SDK where an entire Q is dedicated to it's development.

4) Telerik Charting: Kill me now, rather than make me work with this code centric chart.  Someone please for the love of god develop a designer that we can use to make charting easier, not harder....this falls into the Telerik Reporting bucket as well as it's useless there as well.

5) Telerik Reporting: Html Report Viewer....want to spend hours making a report look good on a printable page then plop it onto your site so people can page though it?...I think so, pretty logical scenario.  We'll you're screwed with the HTML report viewer as it seems to want to combine multiple pages into a long scrolling nightmare.  It's all good though, the team doesn't seem to think it's a valid thing to fix, even with multiple people asking for it.  Additionally, the viewer elements download as tons of single images instead of a single sprite, so you get to see the viewer "pop" in.  I've had this reported forever.

6) JustCode: Double Quotes and double braces...I spend more time trying to delete the second quotes that JC creates for me, than the time it saves.  99% of the time when you report an issue the fix is to shut a feature of JC off....but we have a decompiler now.

7) JustCode: Not respecting my formatting options, or extract method extracts and butts the code up against the left margin which means I have to go in and remove a brace and add it again for auto-formatting to kick in and fix the code style.

8) AspNet Ajax: The assemblies for the controls are already huge, and lots of posts on the forums about the the resource axd sizes, yet no CSS in the entire suite is sent minified....not even on the CDN where every byte costs telerik money (and makes the load faster)

9) WebAii: Active development on a test schedule engine....just for QA only...Developers can go implement their own more complicated solution...and while we're at it, we're going to only really demo the QA edition on telerik TV and webinars.

10) JustCode: Unit Test Runner....On my machine about twice as slow as running the tests native in VS2010...


I use just about every telerik product on a daily basis (aside from JustMock, , and I love reading release notes seeing all the features, but it would excite me just as much to know that existing issues are being addressed instead of just adding more flash.  It's all nice and good to put templates as a feature of JC...but they're horrible to use right now.

I should also mention there are a ton of features that I DO love....like the semi-colon moving the cursor, and the block highlighting...but I want to see old problems fixed first.

[Stuart Hemming]

man, but you sure know how to vent!

-- 
Stuart

[Stuart Hemming]

7). I've never seen that. Not ever.

8) You have a very valid point.

-- 
Stuart

[sitefinitysteve]

Maybe 7 is a bug with my code style settings then

[Stuart Hemming]

Sadly, one of the things I've been waiting for for a while is the option to Export settings. If You could, I could ask you to export yours and compare them to mine.

You could screenshot your settings am add the images to this thread and I could compare them that way.

-- 
Stuart

[sitefinitysteve]

I'm pushing for export as well, not only that but some sort of template sync (if I could save the file to my dropbox that would be awesome)

[Stacey]

3) I'll definitely agree here, I loved the idea of Telerik OpenAccess ORM but the Visual Designer was excessively frustrating to work with. It came down to the point of having to select between it, Entity Framework, or Fluent nHibernate and the fact that I did not have to rely on a quickly degrading GUI is what forced me into nHibernate over Telerik ORM (though both won over Entity Framework at that point in time... may re-explore that when CodeOnly goes RTM).

6) Yes, Yes, Yes. I cannot agree more, here. I love JustCode because of its cleaner user experience. ReSharper got the job done for me, but its layout felt like it was coded by a 20-year experience Linux developer who knew how to write masterful code, but no clue about how to make a convenient UI. I didn't really get as good of an experience from CodeRush - though I still love the access modifier glyphs that it put next to classes. I think that's one of the things I would love to see the most in JustCode other than CSS support. I found CodeRush to try too much with the visuals, to the point where it was frustrating to use on any machine that wasn't a powerhouse - while I can run JustCode on my Netbook and my Desktop just fine. 

7) Yes again! I only have one good arm, and so the more times I have to slide back over to the mouse and click around to move things, the more time I waste not getting things done. It sounds ridiculous to say a major complaint is a minor code change, but if you sit down and do the numbers of how many seconds a day you spend correcting your code from this, it's staggering. I've lost up to an entire hours worth of work over the course of two days just correcting reformatting that JustCode's 'Typing Assistance' added.

10) I found just the opposite, actually. I've seen JustCode's Unit Test Runner to perform remarkably better than Visual Studio's built in one for me. The actual time it takes to 'run' is longer, but the ease of use and getting it to do what you want felt much more intuitive and quicker. With Visual Studio, it felt like everything kept running by accident, and I had to start disabling toolbars and such to keep it from junking my /Test folder with things, but the UnitTest Runner in JustCode feels so fluent and easy to follow. The nice hierarchy system it gives makes it quicker to navigate and the 'running time' isn't so much slower as to feel like I'm losing anything with it. 

I use JustCode everyday, and the Free version of JustMock, and the ASP.NET MVC extensions. I've found that every product has its bugs and weaknesses. I think what keeps me so attracted to Telerik's design is the professional atmosphere it puts forward. I find bugs frequently, but they feel like actual bugs, not just 'bad programming'. They feel like mistakes I would make, as a programmer, everyday - so it doesn't bother me that much. I haven't been a customer long enough to be able to comment on how they handle fixing old problems. I do know that money is extremely tight, so I am very, very careful in considering what tools to spend it on, and have done a lot of evaluation across the board and found the fewest problems with Telerik's products in the web department. 

I'm actually migrating to Telerik over from using ComponentArt products, and truthfully I've found the experience to be quite a bit better - though this whole topic is more about the latest JustCode documentation than all of the bugs we've found in Telerik's products. 

[Ivo Bratoev]

Hello guys,

I just wanted to add that we *are* listening.
First, about the release notes - JustCode 2011 Q1 release is out and we tried to create a much better release notes. Hope you like both the release and its notes :)
We are listening to your other comments as well. We are currently doing our planning for the next Q and I will make sure your comments reach not only our team but other related teams as well.

Best wishes,
Ivo Bratoev
the Telerik team