Optimizing Use of the Telerik Control Panel

We’ve received lots of feedback on the Telerik Control Panel from our users since the initial launch back in mid-2012. A hearty thanks to those who’ve taken the time to provide their thoughts and recommendations. These real-world insights have helped to define the evolution of this application in order to make it the recommended approach for managing local installations of Telerik products.

So, let’s take a quick tour of the current application, highlighting recent enhancements and providing some suggestions for optimizing use.

Getting Started

You can download the Telerik Control Panel by visiting your Telerik account page.

Once installed locally, the Telerik Control Panel will be accessible via Start -> All Programs -> Telerik. If you’re using Windows 8, it will be located in Apps.

On startup, you will be prompted to sign in using an active Telerik account. The “remember me” option allows you to store your credentials so you will be signed in automatically for subsequent uses.

Features

Once authenticated, you will be presented with a “Product View” Screen displaying a summary of Telerik products currently installed on you system (left panel) as well as additional Telerik products available to install (right panel).  

In the top white banner area, there is a breakdown of license types (Purchased, Trial, Free) for “installed” and “available to install” products. In addition, to the far right, there are “Open Contacts”, “Open Options Menu”, and “Open Documentation” buttons, as well as a banner link to the “General Feedback” support form.   The “Sign Out” button for the control panel is accessed by hovering over the logged in user’s email address, which slides up to reveal it.

The black banner area immediately below provides a total count for “Installed Products” versus “Available to Install”, along with check boxes for each category providing an “Install All” option.

The “Options Menu” provides access to the following configuration options:

• Download Settings – Specifies the default download directory for the application
• Proxy Settings – Default setting uses the system proxy settings
• Installation Settings - Specifies installation location and previous version preservation
• Notification Setting – Enables/disables the Control Panel Notification tool (see below)

I won’t go into detail on these setting here as the “Options Menu” and the Notifications feature are recent enhancements to the application that are covered in greater depth in Chris Eargle’s earlier blog post: Notifications and Settings in Telerik Control Panel.

Installing Products

Prior to any installation or upgrade, please be sure that you’ve set your preference for the “keep previous parallel versions” where required. In addition, be sure to close all open instances of Visual Studio to insure proper installation of the Visual Studio Extensions.

You can now select one or more individual products from the “Available to Install” right panel of the “Product View” screen by checking their associated checkboxes. Alternatively, you can select to install all using the previously highlighted “Install All” checkbox at the top of the panel. Once finished, simply click the “Proceed” button.

The next screen will allow you to modify the default installation location, as well as to toggle options on a per product basis for optional features such as local demos and Visual Studio Extension integration for installed versions of the IDE.

Prior to clicking the “Proceed” button, at lower right of the popup, you will need to accept the License Agreement by checking the associated check box.

Your installation should begin, and you can feel free to minimize it and continue with other tasks while the products install.

Updating Products

You can select one or more individual “Installed” products from the left panel of the “Product View” screen by checking their associated check boxes, or you can select to update all using the previously highlighted “Update All” checkbox at the top of the panel. Only products that have updates available will have an “Update” option. Once finished, simply click the “Proceed” button that will slide up at the bottom of the screen.

As with fresh installs, the next screen will allow you to modify the default installation location, as well as to toggle options on a per product basis for optional features such as local demos and Visual Studio Extension integration for installed versions of the IDE.

Once again, the update process should begin, and you can feel free to minimize the progress screen and continue with other tasks.

Updating Trial to a Licensed Version

The Telerik Control Panel provides the perfect solution for facilitating the upgrade of currently installed trial versions of Telerik Products to licensed counterparts. There are no license keys involved. Once you have completed the purchase of product licenses, and your account has been updated in our system, you will be presented with an “Update” option for each applicable “Installed” product. You can, then, follow the update procedure detailed above to make them permanent.

Adding or Removing Features

Another recent enhancement to the application provides an improved way to modify installed products. All installed, updated products will show a “Turn Features On/Off” option with an associated check box.

Clicking the check box and clicking the “Proceed” button will bring up a screen that allows you to modify currently installed or uninstalled optional features such as Local Demos and Visual Studio Extension integration for currently installed IDE versions.

This is especially useful after installing newer versions of Visual Studio, obviating the need to do a full uninstall/reinstall of Telerik products.

Repairing or Removing Products

If you need to repair or to completely remove an installed product, you can do so by clicking on it under “Installed” products in the left panel. This will bring up a screen that provides check box options for “Remove” or “Repair” (as well as another means of turning features on/off) in the black border at bottom.

Visual Studio Integration

We’ll close here with a final note about recommendations related to installing Telerik Visual Studio Extensions, as well as product updates from within Visual Studio using the built-in Telerik notifications.

Although it is possible to upgrade Telerik products by means of the green popup notification that is associated with the “Telerik” Menu in Visual Studio, in most cases, this is no longer the recommended method. It is superseded by the Control Panel option, which offers finer grained control of the installations, made possible by the “Options Menu” described above.

The one exception to this is related to the installation of Internal Builds of Telerik products. Currently, Internal Builds can only be installed using the notifications option available in Visual Studio.

In all other cases, we recommend using the Control Panel to manage the local installations of Telerik Products. Then, open existing Visual Studio projects and use the Telerik Upgrade Wizard to select the newly installed version and to upgrade the project using this release.

Roadmap

As a policy, Telerik roadmaps are built on careful consideration of the requirements of our customers. The feature requests and/or functionality suggestions most commonly raised are given the highest consideration for addition to our products.

As an example here, we’re well aware of the community’s request for supporting the installation of Internal Builds through the Control Panel. This feature is under development and will be available in the near future.

We encourage you to use the “General Feedback” support form to provide your insights on how to improve the Telerik Control Panel.