It doesn’t even feel like it’s been that long since I wrote a post on “Telerik in Numbers” (almost 10 months to date), and that blog content feels very out of date. While I plan to update you with some new, fresh stats in the future, today I wanted to update you with some exciting news that will impact the stats I gave you on the number of offices and people we have.

I am really happy to announce the acquisition of NimblePros. Throughout the years we’ve had many touch points with Michelle and Steve Smith, the founders of NimblePros....

At Telerik, just like at every other software development shop, we have struggled with the definition of "Done". Throughout the years we've had many definitions of "Done" within teams and individuals:

• "It's done, but it's not tested" (Testing is left for the next sprint).
• "Yeah, it's working well. There are a few blocking issues but we'll fix that later" (Bug fixing is always a "tail" task and is never budgeted as part of the v1 of a "Done" feature).
• "Sure, it's 100% done but it doesn't have any UI yet"...

It gets quiet around the office over the holidays. I like to use this time to reflect on the year behind us, both from the industry perspective, as well as from the Telerik perspective. It's the only 5 days out of the 365 in the year when we are not in a turbulent whirlwind of activity.

From an industry perspective, 2011 was pretty dynamic and we saw some really powerful trends pick up steam:

1. Cloud
   The proliferation of cloud computing. Every solution needs to have a cloud back-end. More and more of our information is starting to live...

Microsoft's long awaited release of Silverlight 5 happened on Friday. Silverlight 5.0 ships with a ton of new features, including new media and graphic improvements as well as extending the trust model to the browser (a big deal for some Line of Business applications). This release happened without any fanfare but that hardly diminishes its value. Some of the great things in the release are listed here.

While Microsoft did not announce that there was going to be a Silverlight 6, they did announce they would extend support for Silverlight 5 for ten years until 10 Dec 2021, as long...

Or maybe it isn’t that dead? OK…you expected me to say that, and you’re thinking, “this guy is just trying to sell me Silverlight tools and save his business.” I will not argue…you’re almost right. There’s one small correction to be made - we are not trying to save our business. :) Rather, we are hard at work on all fronts, be it HTML5 or Win8, so it doesn’t make a difference for us what technology you’ll ultimately choose as we have all bases covered.

As I’ve said many times, use whatever makes most sense for your business. That said, I...

Next week is the much-anticipated BUILD developer conference about the future of development on the Windows platform, and the public unveiling of Windows 8. Microsoft says that Windows 95 changed the PC and Windows 8 will “change everything.” Clearly, the hyperbole and hype are already running high.

The conference has been under such secrecy that we have been told all phone conversations at Microsoft are being recorded to prevent leaks. Something big is going to happen and Telerik is excited to be part of it. We will have a big crew attending the event eager to watch the events...

Yesterday I read an excellent blog post by Chris Dixon:
http://cdixon.org/2011/08/28/do-you-want-to-sell-sugar-water-or-do-you-want-to-change-the-world/
 
It reminded me of something I am seeing too often when I talk to people, especially younger guys who want to be entrepreneurs. I get the feeling that they put a value only on big ideas, big discoveries, big success stories. Everyone wants to change the world and if they can’t, it is seen as a massive failure. People want to be like Steve Jobs – wake up, imagine something, make it a smashing success and change the lives of billions of people.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think...

Todd Anglin from our team posted a great blog entry yesterday. In it, he provides some interesting examination and commentary on Microsoft’s vision of the web, the birth of XAML technologies and the evolution of MS’s view on what the development experience for the web should be.

Some of Todd’s main points are that 

1. We should not be terribly surprised by Microsoft’s swings in direction. 
2. The swings are driven by competitive pressure. 
3. HTML5+JS+CSS3 is a viable application development stack. 
4. You need good tooling for that (and he makes a gentle Kendo plug).

The blog also received a number of interesting comments that made me think Todd was being...

Telerik has been in business for 9 years. During that time, we have made over 200 releases, with more than 400 service packs. We release internal bits every week and most teams do a daily build. Today, our portfolio consists of 4 Product Groups and over 20 different individual products. Telerik maintains in TFS a code base of more than 10,000,000 lines of code which is covered by over 350,000 unit and integration tests. For key products we have 80-90% test coverage. We test our different products on over 300 virtual machines running on large IBM servers. To guarantee we don’t lose important information we...

This could have been a blog post about the (almost) 9 year anniversary of .NET but the title is just a play of words. As pictures are worth a thousand words, I'll let the screenshots do the talking about a really cool feature that will ship in JustCode very soon.

The “Decompile” command is available inside metadata .cs files and you can run it both for members:

(the above command does this)

and for entire types:

Want to learn more? Keep an eye on the Telerik blogs and our Twitter feed in the upcoming weeks. We will be posting a lot of information.

We will also offer FREE licenses...