Telerik blogs
It's so nice to be back in the office after being nearly a month away. It's hard to catch up as many things happened, however, it was well worth it. It was a very intense and emotional time (at least for me).

TechEd was great and our team had lots of fun. For those of you who were not at TechEd 2006, you can check out some pics in the online Gallery: http://www.telerik.com/Default.aspx?PageId=2833. I would like to use the opportunity to say a BIG "Thank you" to everyone who paid us a visit at the booth. I hope to see many of you at TechEd next year again.

It was good to meet customers and show them the exciting stuff over which we've been working lately. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I hope that the telerik WinForms suite and the telerik Reporting product will be worthy additions to the toolbox of our customers. There's lots of work remaining before we release them officially as we want to polish everything in our quest to the "Holy Grail" of component development - excellent performance coupled with very rich features.

TechEd was an excellent event, but as my wife didn't count it as the perfect honeymoon (for those of you with whom I haven't been in touch lately I am now a married man), I had to plan for other alternatives. My choice was the Dominican Republic for which I had heard lots of great things. So, immediately after TechEd we departed for Punta Cana and... the whole thing turned out to be a huge disappointment and we quickly switched the Dominican with Miami. It turned out to be for the better and we had a really great time in this wonderful city which I visited for the first time.

Meanwhile, our team made a wonderful release and I am very proud of everyone who pushed hard to make it happen. What happened:
  1. We finally rolled out officially the next generation of our AJAX offering (r.a.d.ajax) which generated a lot of interest at TechEd. Our whole approach to AJAX changed and that's why we decided to release our new framework under a brand new name rather than as a version update of our previous ajax product r.a.d.callback. There are many new things in terms of ideology, ease-of-use, performance and simplicity and if you want to create remarkable interfaces you could definitely toy with it.
  2. We released the completely re-written menu component. Following our success with r.a.d.tabstrip, we migrated the r.a.d.menu to the codebase we built for the tabstrip and the new r.a.d.menu 4.0 has the same goodies as r.a.d.tabstrip 3.0 - semantic rendering as list items, 100% CSS styling, powerful design-time, JSON serialization, and so on. Just in case you are wondering what product will get the next facelift, r.a.d.panelbar is scheduled for "surgery" and will appear in the Q3 release. As you can imagine, it's not an easy thing to trim down output and make the product richer but we feel pretty confident that the new menu an d tabstrip can offer customers a brand new perspective at navigational controls.
  3. We made a few other really sweet additions to the r.a.d.controls product line. We got some great feedback from customers and luckily, we managed to incorporate quite a bit of the requests in Q2. As some of you have already noticed, we added support for WebResources, we improved our skins mechanism, we added some design-time improvements, polished the APIs here and there... it was lots of work.
Apart from the technological innovations and developments, we prepared a lot of surprises (it's positive guys, there won't be any unpleasant surprises to upset your summer vacation:) for customers but I will blog about that in separate posts as the material is quite lengthy.

Staying on the technical side of things, I just wanted to throw in a quick update that almost all telerik controls work beautifully with the Atlas June CTP. Only the r.a.d.editor had some issues, but those were addressed in the upcoming SP1 for the Q2 release. It's a challenge to keep up with Atlas as it's undergoing constant evolution, but I'm really happy that our engineering team doesn't face significant challenges so far.

Well, that's all from me for today.

How's the Q2 update working for you guys? I'd really appreciate your viewpoint and get to know whether you feel we are going in the right direction.

vassil_terziev
About the Author

Vassil Terziev

As Chief Innovation Officer at Progress, Vassil Terziev is responsible for identifying growth strategies and new market opportunities, as well as promoting internal innovation.

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