Your real world advocate

Greetings! Or as we are often inclined to say in Texas, Howdy! My name is Todd Anglin and I am a Technical Evangelist at Telerik. Before I begin blogging away on the Telerik.com blogs, I want to take a moment to introduce myself to everyone in the Telerik developer community that I have yet to meet. Many of you may know me from the Telerik Community Forums (where I am still quite active) or from my other blog, TelerikWatch.com. To all of my loyal Telerik Watch readers, thank you very much for your support! The Telerik Watch blog has been extremely successful and I will continue to update it regularly as long you continue to visit. But more on that in a minute.

I (officially) joined the Telerik team about a month ago, leaving behind the world of working in a Fortune 200 enterprise IT shop. During my time in the 2,100 person enterprise IT organization, I learned much about what it means to build software in a large organization, not the least of which is the bureaucracy you must deal with everyday. I have always had a passion for working with .NET, though, so joining the smart (and bureaucracy free!) people at Telerik has been a real pleasure. Now I get to help make your developer life better from the "outside".

In my new role, you (the developer community) are my focus. My goal is to help you learn about, understand, and efficiently work with Telerik's products so that you can use them in all of your projects and maximize your .NET productivity. I am also here to listen to your feedback and understand your problems and struggles so that I can help the Telerik development teams produce controls that satisfy your needs.

I will use my unique "enterprise perspective" to help translate your problems into Telerik solutions. Real world problems and issues are a whole different ballgame than simple quick start demos or isolated demo projects. I know you can't always box-up your problems to ship to us for troubleshooting, so that means you need to have the knowledge to quickly troubleshoot problems on your own. As your real world advocate at Telerik, my goal is to provide you with that knowledge so that you can work quickly with Telerik products and .NET.

That brings us to the "charter" for this blog. I will use this blog space to bring you technical articles about tips, tricks, and sometimes just the basics of working with Telerik products and other .NET related technologies and tools (such as ASP.NET AJAX, JavaScript, and CSS). Telerik Watch will continue to play host to less technical posts that bring you the latest news about Telerik and .NET (such as today's post about the Q4 2006 SP2 release). Together, these blogs will help you become an expert Telerik and .NET developer.

To get things started, I will begin a multi part series on Ajax next week. We will look at the JavaScript nuts and bolts that underpin Ajax, explore the best practices for using Ajax in your applications (ASP.NET AJAX and r.a.d.ajax), and discuss how to optimize Ajax for optimum performance. I look forward to interacting with you in this new venue and I hope that you'll enjoy this new blog. Don't miss a minute of the action and this blog's RSS feed to your readers today!

Have a good weekend~
Todd