Telerik RadControls bring .NET developers a wide range of useful controls for Web applications, not to mention better productivity.
Anybody who's read these tips for any length of time know about our penchant for useful, interesting developer tools. What generally makes them useful is their ability to increase productivity, reduce programmer effort, supply missing or improve on existing functionality, and so forth. What likewise makes them interesting is their ease of use, the degree to which they're transparent, supported, and explained, and how clean and solid the code they emit might be. By all of these metrics, Telerik RadControls uphold the highest standards and deliver excellent value to their users.
Telerik RadControls come in several forms, all of which are designed to work with the ASP.NET environment. What makes Telerik's offerings really stand out is their implementations, which either provide complete support for Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (RadControls for ASP.NET) or are built directly on top of the latest Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX framework (RadControls Prometheus, which also co-exists quite happily with RadControls for ASP.NET).
These toolsets deliver a wide range of controls that integrate seamlessly with Visual Studio .NET versions. These include the following:
- RadAjax: This product supports codeless centralized configuration of Ajax relations (the older version uses its own Ajax engine, the Prometheus version uses the standard MS ASP.NET AJAX engine). Ajax -enabled controls are rendered with Ajax callbacks, and can preserve interactions with the server and with other controls on the same page.
- User interface and data management tools include RadCalendar, RadChart, RadColorPicker, RadEditor, RadInput, RadScheduler, and more. These invariably get rave reviews from gleeful developers who solve difficult problems or who substitute lightweight, elegant components for heavyweight, inelegant ones (see the developer postings at ComponentSource for glowing reviews of Telerik).
- Mechanical interface tools include RadSlider, RadSplitter, RadTooltip, and RadWindow. Here again, developers get pretty enthusiastic about how simple, powerful, and usable these tools can be.
Free trials of all products are available at the Telerik Web site for the downloading (visit the product pages individually and click on the Free Trial button). A RadControls bundle that include the ASP.NET controls, WinForms controls, and a reporting tool goes for $1,299 per seat (individually, these products cost $799 for ASP.NET and Winforms, $399 for the reporting tool). All product licenses are perpetual and royalty free with full redistribution rights, and you get C# and JavaScript source code for all tools. Annual subscriptions cost 50% of the initial purchase cost, and volume discounts or enterprise licenses are available.
Ed Tittel is a writer and trainer whose interests include XML and development topics, along with IT Certification and information security. E-mail etittel@techtarget.com with comments, questions, or suggested topics or tools to review. Cool tools rule!
