Vassil Terziev's blog

Wishing you great health in 2012. For everything else, there is … Telerik

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:49:50 GMT

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:

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 in the cloud.
Mobile
The need for a mobile strategy and mobile experiences. Mobile devices are something that is as mainstream as it gets and it will spur a new age in computing.
Consumerization of IT
Users are not happy with ugly Enterprise apps. They want their consumer experiences to be taken to the world of Enterprise software.
Fragmentation of platforms
Life of developers and IT people in general is getting rapidly more complex. They have to battle ever more platforms (see above), different technologies and…they can't really skip any one of them.

What's common amongst these? It's several things:

These emerging trends also represent a huge challenge for the people involved in software development
They represent a tremendous market opportunity
We'll be there in helping you solve these. Telerik made many investments in 2011 to address the emerging needs and the difficulties that stem for software developers and their teams

But let's take a quick look back at 2011 and I will get back to 2012 shortly… From our internal perspective, 2011 was a very transformational year at Telerik as we made a number of investments, some visible, some not yet, to be able to provide developers with solutions to all of the 5 industry shifts we are seeing and the associated challenges.

Traditionally, Telerik has been addressing only points #3 and #4, and to some extent #2 (only in the limited world of Windows Phone 7). Many people still see Telerik as a UI controls company. We are victims of our own success - that's where we started, that's what most people use our products for, and that's where we have established ourselves as market leaders. In 2011, we did a lot to continue our momentum in that space and bring the best UI tooling on the market across all Microsoft presentation platforms. With the up and coming introduction of our Windows 8 tooling, Telerik will be in a unique position to deliver the industry's leading UI toolset to Microsoft developers.

With the introduction of Kendo UI in 2011, we made an important step and transcended the Microsoft boundary and the world of Enterprise LOB applications. With Kendo UI, we are ready for the HTML5 wave and the next-generation mobile application development.

That said, in 2011, Telerik made a lot of progress in the tooling area as well - our tools for better development grew and improved. In 2011 we added 2 new products - JustTrace and JustDecompile. JustMock continued its rise to prominence. JustCode got out of its teenage years and today delivers pretty much everything you'll need for development productivity. Our Data Tools also matured considerably and currently Telerik has the most powerful, and probably also the easiest to use, .NET ORM for Enterprise development.

While we don't mind to be seen as a UI controls vendor, it's just now that people are starting to recognize us a premier vendor of productivity tools too. In reality, we've outgrown even that label. UI controls and .NET developer tools is where we started, that's what matters, that's where we want to continue being immediate #1. Nonetheless, Telerik today is very different from what it used to be in 2009 when we started our journey outside of UI controls. Today, we are much closer to our end goal of providing teams with complete solutions that simplify software development, improve collaboration and make all roles involved in the process really productive and aligned. In the worlds of Sitefinity, TeamPulse and Test Studio, our goal is to do the same as we did with UI controls - go from zero to award-winning solutions through innovation, rapid release cycles and user-driven roadmap development, to ultimately create the industry's premier offering for software development teams of all sizes.

In 2011 we started re-aligning our offerings for agile project management & collaboration, testing
and content management to deliver a more complete solution and benefit. The teams grew considerably, the products "strengthened" and got many integration points. They also received many features to make them prime competitors in their space. We are marching towards 2012 with a great sense of fulfillment and we hope our investments will make our customers happy and really productive. It's especially fulfilling to be able to offer more and more solutions to the growing challenges our customers face. As we have always pledged, we will be there for you -regardless of what technology or challenge comes your way. We will fight hard for your trust and try to "deliver more than expected" as that's what you've come to expect from us.

Some other highlights from 2011 that I couldn't leave out of the recap:

I must salute our teams for their efforts which brought us 29 industry awards this year. It's also an opportunity for me to say a BIG "Thank You" to every one of you who supported us with your vote. It means a lot to us and it a big motivator to continue to excel.
For those of you who follow news regarding Telerik, it won't be a surprise when I say Telerik grew tremendously in the past year. To be able to continue delivering more than expected, we continued to build out the team by hiring top talent all over the world. Our team grew considerably across all of our offices (Hey, why not check out one of 28 open positions we have today). I'm especially happy that industry stars such as Chris Sells and Doug Seven have chosen Telerik as the next step in their rich career. Their industry expertise and understanding of the software developer community will help pave Telerik's position as a leading provider of tools you need for development of web, desktop and mobile applications.
Lastly, and definitely not least importantly, we are talking to more and more of you on all continents via our community programs which now reach over 400 user groups. In the online world, our community topped 500,000 members. For some other fast facts on Telerik, check out my post Telerik in Numbers.

I could link each and every one of our accomplishments in 2011 but it will be a long list and it might sound like unnecessary self-praise. I'd rather use the opportunity to thank everyone on the Telerik team for making all these great things happen and for keeping our customers happy.

The best part - 2011 is just a prelude for the very exciting things coming up in 2012 - from brand new products, to major extensions of existing product lines to a ton of improvements that don't make the headlines but matter for you in your daily lives. Many of those great, and unannounced, projects and products will soon see the light.

The business things aside, don't forget to be nice, to be human. Say something nice to the people around you. Be a better and more responsible citizen of the world. Don't forget that you matter. All of us do.

2011 was a great one; I'm looking forward to 2012 and once again wish you and your family all the best. On behalf of the Telerik team, I'd like to wish you a very happy and prosperous 2012.

Best,
Vassil

Silverlight: Silverlight 5 is out. What does this mean to me?

Vassil Terziev — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:19:00 GMT

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 as you are using a supported browser. It’s a small catch as you don’t have a guarantee that the SL plugin will run in newer versions next year. That said, in a locked-down corporate environment it’s not that much of an issue.

What does this mean for a .NET developer today, not in 2021? What it means is that Silverlight is still the best option for .NET developers interested in building rich, interactive browser-based LOB and data visualization applications designed specifically for Windows users. Silverlight combines the richness of a Windows desktop experience with the reach of a web application (e.g. all Windows XP, Vista, 7, Mac OS X, etc.). The addition of LOB-centric tooling for Silverlight in Visual Studio means that not only can you build desktop-like experiences in the browser, you can do it quickly and easily with the tools you already have. If you have control over the deployment environment, it’s definitely the easiest path to really rich applications today.

What does this mean for Telerik customers? As I have stated before, our Silverlight strategy has not shifted. Our mission at Telerik is to make developers more productive and we will continue to support Silverlight for as long as you, our customers, continue to use it. In addition, as you start to use new technology like HTML5 or WinRT, we will be there for you as well.

As always, we are hard at work getting ready to release our SL 5 support for you. As Michael said on his blog, we'll have our Silverlight 5 support for you just in time for Christmas. You will see how committed we are to Silverlight and WPF when we announce the roadmap for the first release in 2012.

Still confused over what technology to use for your next project? Stay tuned to this spot to find out some more information and guidance on that soon.

Silverlight is dead. F****** dead

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:20:00 GMT

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 do want to share our thinking on Silverlight so that you can make a more informed decision.

At Telerik we still believe in Silverlight, and we are betting on it. We are not only continuing to sell our existing Silverlight controls, but we are also continuing to invest in the ongoing development of new controls for Silverlight. We’re doing this because we believe Silverlight is not dead…at least not yet and not for a long time.

All the Cool Kids are saying that Silverlight is dead, or at least assuming so because it got zero sessions at BUILD. I think a product is dead when most of the things below are true:

When the platform vendor drops it and leaves it without any updates for a long time
There are significantly better alternatives on the market
When all ISVs that focus on a platform abandon it and the ecosystem dies
Everyone stops using it

Let’s think about each of those points.

Microsoft’s Strategy

Let’s say that Microsoft stops adding features to the Silverlight plug-in after Silverlight 5, which is still slated to ship later this year. With SL5, developers finally get a super mature platform to build line-of-business apps. The tooling is there. The performance is there. The stuff will run on Windows 8 (rumor has it that desktop mode will run even on ARM devices). Add this to the Microsoft support guarantee and you have viable platform for many years to come.

Say an app has a 5 year lifecycle. If you start today with SL/WPF, the underlying platform will still be very relevant past 2017. In fact, even with no additional attention from Microsoft, Silverlight and WPF are well positioned to serve businesses for years (decades?) to come. The best testament to this effect is WinForms.

Windows Forms has received pretty much zero love from Microsoft since 2005, but that hasn’t stopped many businesses from using it as their preferred platform for building LOB apps. Even today, many people use Telerik tools to build WinForms applications, and I don’t see this number drastically decreasing. Remember, that’s 6 years after the platform got its last big update.

To further clarify the support issue, Silverlight has a 12-month support commitment from Microsoft. That means if Microsoft formally announces the end of Silverlight, you still get direct support for 12-months. Visual Studio, including its tools for Silverlight development, has a 10-year support cycle.

The Alternatives

Let’s talk about the second point – the alternatives to Silverlight. If you are building a LOB app, what is your best option? Flex, HTML5, Silverlight, WPF, WinRT+ JS/XAML?

If you are looking at Flex, you are probably not the ideal customer for Silverlight anyway.
WinRT is nice, but it has a couple of major obstacles:
- First is that Win8 is not just around the corner, and for now, you don’t have anything to build against. As Win8 progresses through beta 1/2/3, many things will change, requiring you to invest countless hours to keep your stuff running. In short, WinRT just isn’t ready.
- Second, if you want to build a Metro app, you really need to spend a lot of time understanding the Metro guidelines and the target application scenarios appropriate for Metro. You can’t just port your existing SL/HTML stuff to run in Metro mode. It’s useless and it will kill the whole experience. And if you want to run in Win8 desktop mode, “normal” Silverlight is waiting for you. :)
I won’t even touch upon the fact that Win8 targets mostly consumer apps in Metro mode and that it will take 3-4 years for it to get ANY meaningful adoption in the Enterprise space. Telerik EVP Doug Seven has a great blog post about the target app types for Metro.
Another option is to use HTML5 plus .NET on the server. That’s a viable alternative, but unless you need your application to be accessible on every device imaginable and you have control over your environment, it’s much easier to achieve the same result with Silverlight. No browser compatibility issues, no lack of tools (yes, I know HTML/JavaScript tools will catch up, but we are talking about your options today and 2-3 years ahead). HTML5 is great, but it’s still maturing.
Silverlight gives you the best of both worlds today – a rich presentation platform + the deployment/update story of an HTML application. You also have a clean logical separation – pure data is coming from the server and a presentation layer that is built on top of that data. Add to that the fact that Silverlight lets you easily integrate your existing .NET codebases (or even native code via PInvoke) and it makes it the best choice for LOB apps.

The Ecosystem

Moving on to the third point: the Silverlight ecosystem. This one is pretty important. Even if Silverlight 5 is the last version of the plug-in (which, for the record, we don’t believe it is), at Telerik we have a long list of things that we plan to do for the future that will improve your Silverlight development experience. If you look at our roadmap, it is pretty packed. There are also many other Silverlight-based things that are super big chunks of work and will ship in 2012 (I can’t share more as I will spoil the surprise but it is MAJOR stuff).

We don’t plan to stop, and this will only make it easier to build anything using Silverlight in a fraction of the time of other platforms (such as HTML5). From what I can tell, all other major vendors also plan to release a lot of new things in Silverlight moving forward, too. This means that when you are using SL, you are in good hands as the ecosystem that enriches the platform is standing behind it, even if Microsoft is slowing their investment in the platform. Our work WILL have a very tangible effect on your productivity.

The customers

Finally, point 4, customers and platform adoption. Ultimately you are in control. For as long as there is customer demand for Silverlight, we will keep on creating the best tooling for SL. And as exciting as BUILD is for the long-term future of Microsoft, we don’t see it having any impact on customer demand for Silverlight. Of course, we will also provide a complete toolset for WinRT when Windows 8 ships, but we very much believe that Silverlight is the way to go today if you are building Enterprise LOB apps.

Silverlight is not dead for us. How about you?

The countdown to BUILD!

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:57:00 GMT

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 unfold.

We hope you were lucky enough to get a ticket before the event sold-out, and we hope to see you there. We will be sponsoring BUILD events all week including:

The un-official BUILD Pre-con on Monday delivered by Billy Hollis
Telerik Lamborghini rides on Monday night and Tuesday morning
BUILD Blogger Bash on Wednesday
The official GeekFest Attendee party on Thursday night
And more☺

BUILD will have a small expo hall, but we have decided not to participate. BUILD is Microsoft’s week to shine and share some major announcements about the future of Windows development. The information Microsoft will share is so important that we want developers to focus on the core Microsoft message during the BUILD week without distraction. There is plenty of time after the BUILD week to talk Telerik.

Trust us. It’s going to be a big week

We are also sending to BUILD an army of developers, team leads, and senior management, not an army of marketing people. These technical and Telerik experts will attend the conference and watch the sessions alongside the community, mingling with the audience and getting real-time reactions to the BUILD news in “hallway conversations.” Telerik is already well prepared for what BUILD will reveal, but we’re eager to see how the community at responds to the news.

Our staff will also be tweeting and blogging about the sessions, bringing the conversation to the entire .NET community- even if you can’t be in Anaheim! You should follow our team on Twitter to stay connected! Alternatively, feel free to pull one of the guys in a Telerik green shirt and chit-chat.☺

As a close Microsoft partner, we have been working hard all summer getting our tools Windows 8 ready. We have some exciting new announcements about our Windows 8 support in the HTML5 and XAML space, so stay tuned.

Finally, in a few weeks, we will be hosting a post-BUILD webinar/panel where we will help people better understand Telerik's product strategy (related to BUILD) after you’ve had time to fully-digest the core BUILD announcements. Stay tuned for a link to register.

Happy //build/-ing next week everyone!

Making the world a better place. One task at a time.

Vassil Terziev — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:56:46 GMT

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 it works this way. None of the people that changed human history started their journey with that motivation. Einstein, Newton, Curie, Jobs and many others altered human history with their discoveries and inventions, but the climax was a result of many smaller prior efforts, some theirs, some by others, that built on top of each other. The big idea was just the spark that lit everything up.

I don’t want to imply in any way that people should not dream big. Just the contrary – people need to dream big and have an endless drive to make the world a better place!

My key struggle is with the concept that if something does not radically and immediately change the world, it is no good and is not worth the effort. For example, why should I write a unit test against that crap of old code or refactor it rather than throw everything away and write a "next–generation" app from scratch?

Solving a small challenge opens the doors for a bigger dream and bigger success. I can give an example from Telerik.

When we started the company 9 years ago, we did not want to change the world, and we couldn't do it, even if we wanted. All we wanted to do was make a super nice rich text editor for ASP.NET and make customers happy. Only because we were successful in this small endeavor did we have the chance to dream of something bigger – to solve people's need for a better ASP.NET component suite. The dream got bigger and bigger with time. We became more knowledgable as people, as an organization, lots of things crystallized in our heads and we were discovering how we could solve bigger problems.

But what I am getting at is that none of this would have been possible if we had not been able to solve the thousands of smaller problems that we faced every day since our inception. If we had not managed to solve those small issues, if we had not built the internal discipline to tackle hard problems, to not be afraid of change, to push the boundaries, to learn how to execute we would have never gotten a chance to be able to dream of changing the way people create software. If we had just waited for the super brilliant idea to hit us on the head and only then get moving, we would have never progressed. We would’ve kept on dreaming about changing the way people write software, but had no ability to make that dream a reality.

What I learned along the way is that you can’t have a goal to change the world. As Michael Jackson had put it – "If you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a change." Changing the bigger world is not always in your control. Changing yourself and the people around you – much more so.

So, if you want to change the world, start with yourself, with your family, friends, colleagues - make them better. Show them that every small improvement in all facets of our lives matters, be it personal lives or work. Picking up the trash from the otherwise clean street, not throwing your cigarette filter in the sand on the beach, being nice to people, spending more time with your family, being helpful to others, planting a tree, writing a unit test, refactoring some old code, adding a small new feature – all of this counts. Might be small but when you multiply it by a few billion people – it changes the world in a big way. You know, the Butterfly effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect) – every action of ours has implications.

Do your best every day in big things and small – and this will change the world beyond your imagination. Even though the press won’t talk about it, everything you do matters.

Our Strategy Has NOT Shifted – Telerik, HTML5 and Silverlight

Vassil Terziev — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:52:00 GMT

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

We should not be terribly surprised by Microsoft’s swings in direction.
The swings are driven by competitive pressure.
HTML5+JS+CSS3 is a viable application development stack.
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 misunderstood, and Telerik’s strategy was unclear. It seemed as though you felt we were promoting HTML5 as the panacea for everything and we were dropping the ball on XAML by favoring one technology over the other. In fact, I had been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about posting something on this topic, and the comments made it clear that I owe you some more explanation of Telerik’s plans (unlike Microsoft, I want you to know what we’re thinking, why it is such, and what we are doing before BUILD:) ).

Let’s start with the key thing you need to know so that it doesn’t get lost in the clutter:

"WE UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR goal is to deliver results for your business and use the technology that makes most sense for your objectives. THEREFORE, OUR GOAL IS TO provide you with the best tools for any type of work that you might be doing."

It is as simple as that, and we have never stopped working towards that end. Our job, as an infrastructure company, is to provide you with versatility for the changing technology landscape. We cannot afford to make bets – the HTML5 vs. SL/WPF debate is not our war. We don’t care who wins or what technology you ultimately decide to use. Our objective is to provide you with the best tools for whatever choice you make. If we had the bandwidth and had a business model around it, we would be doing dev tools and components for PHP, Java, RoR, etc. We don’t care about platform providers – we care only about making your life easier and more manageable and helping you get the tooling you need to get the job done.

It is true that we are working on some amazing HTML5 tooling in the form of Kendo. That is not a shift in strategy for us – in fact, it is a representation of the strategy we have always had. We have always been one of the pioneers in the web space and you should continue to expect us to be on the forefront there. That said, if you take a look at the release notes for our Q2 2011 release, as well as our Roadmap for Silverlight, you will see that we have made and continue to make SUBSTANTIAL investments in the technology:

What's coming for Q3:

Beta of new charting control
ListView
TimeLine
PDF Viewer
Entity Framework DataSource
TreeMap and PivotMap official release
New LOB CRM integration demo
RichTextBox will provide support for Mail Merge, Styles and Columns

Many of our products such as TeamPulse, TestStudio, parts of Sitefinity, parts of JustCode, JustTrace, JustDecompile, some new products we are building – all are using SL/WPF technology. It is the best testament I can think of to convey our belief that SL/WPF rocks, that C# is absolutely amazing and that you can hardly do similar applications, in a short amount of time, with JavaScript/CSS/HTML5.

We all love Silverlight and WPF but sometimes it is not enough regardless of how good it is. I’ll use one of our products as an example – TeamPulse. As some of you may know, TeamPulse is Telerik’s project management tool for agile software development. It does a great job in helping teams collaborate better and deliver results consistently. The tool is built with Silverlight. Why Silverlight in the first place? Because SL is a great platform for RIA applications. We could’ve done it in HTML but it would’ve taken us much more time to deliver the same feature set. TeamPulse is a tool that a normal team of software developers would use at work where they have a laptop/desktop machine. They are running Windows or Mac and they have browsers capable of running SL so the plugin is not a problem for them. Customers I’ve spoken with generally care more about the capabilities in the product and the workflows that it supports. From an encapsulated point of view, SL is just fine for them. But there’s a problem…. Many teams want to provide their boss or client an easy way to track progress on key stuff using their iOS device. They also want the community to be able to vote on features in a UserVoice-like style while they are in the subway traveling to work and going through the daily news on their phone/pad. The problem with that is that you can’t run TeamPulse on an iOS device. It’s no longer a problem when they take a seat behind the office machine, but you make the app unavailable to them while they are in a meeting, in the park, etc. and they only have their phone/pad. For many customers, that is a problem as they want to have readily available access to everything of importance to them.

There aren’t many solutions to the above problem:

We make an HTML-based subset of features that you want people to run on devices that don’t support SL
We ignore the guys that want to run any part of TeamPulse on a phone
We keep our fingers crossed that Steve Jobs will wake up one day and tell everyone at Apple to embrace plugins and add support for Silverlight.

Let’s face it, 3 is unlikely to happen and 2 does not make a lot of sense – people won’t be buying our product if they cannot effectively deliver the needed information to outside stakeholders. So, we are left with Option 1 – build some of the TeamPulse functionality in HTML5. We do not see a need to re-write the SL app that you are running on your office machine but we do want to complement it with a few HTML-based features so that what you need is actually available on all the devices you typically use.

At Telerik, we hold the view that modern developers will have to take a hybrid approach and build some applications (or parts of them) using HTML5+JS (the so-called “reach” apps/features”) and some with more rich, device-specific, technology such as our XAML tools, ObjectiveC, Java ME, etc. This is clearly the direction that Windows 8 is taking, enabling you to build applications with HTML5+JS or .NET/XAML. As the modern application platform evolves, so do we at Telerik.

It’s my belief that we should not confuse a technology decision – made based on the needs of the business – with a political decision. It’s hard to argue that writing an Enterprise-grade application in C#/XAML is a better experience compared to writing the same application with JS/HTML5. The problem is that Microsoft does not live in a world of its own – it has competition and it needs to react. There are many people out there that need mixed scenarios (like the one I described above for TeamPulse) and they need a better HTML5 story to cover some requirements that you cannot cover today with Silverlight. Having said that, I fully expect comments saying ‘everything is possible in JS/HTML5.’ And I will agree in advance – yes, everything is possible, but everything also has a cost. An average SL dev can create some really advanced applications in a short amount of time. An average web developer can’t – either the person has to be skilled or the time will be longer. For Microsoft, it would’ve been best if there was only one OS, one language to program in, one IDE. But it can’t happen. And it’s not because of Google – everything changed because of Apple.

Every so often I hear that people think we are trying to brainwash our customers and that we’re something like a ‘propaganda machine’ for Redmond. The ugly truth is that we’ve got bitten by the confused Microsoft messaging and silence as much as or more than most. We would’ve liked more guidance from Microsoft on where things are going and why. It definitely would’ve been nice. But, and it is a big BUT, they don’t owe us anything. They are not our parents that have to take care of us – we need to find our own ways to deal with challenges. Microsoft is battling huge challenges and they cannot think about every ISV and company under the sun. If we don’t like what they offer, if we don’t see cost and productivity gains using their products and technologies, if we feel grossly mistreated, if we feel there are better business opportunities then both we and our customers are free to explore the greener pastures. I for one believe that the Microsoft ecosystem is a great place to be and that after BUILD we will have something of, as one colleague said, “a true renaissance” for most developers.

So what’s the take-away from this long blog post?

Have no fear :) Telerik will provide you with the best tooling for web app, XAML and mobile development.
Don’t be scared about shifts in technology. There are changes that affect everyone but it’s not as dramatic as the media, and some interested parties, like it to be.
Get ready for “hybrid applications” that will use many different presentation technologies and will connect through services to a single server-side technology that will probably live somewhere in the cloud.

Telerik in numbers

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:35:35 GMT

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 back up everything (that is, terabytes of data) on tape in addition to the real-time remote replication. We have many systems to ensure business continuity 365 days in the year (sometimes even 366:). It takes less than 2 hours to restore any critical asset. Most of the critical items are available in under 15 minutes.

In just 9 years, we have earned the trust of over 100,000 customers. Using our tools they have built applications that are used on a daily basis by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Our customers and ever-growing community are served by 400+ employees from 15 different nationalities spread in 9 offices on 4 continents. Our average response time for the last 6 months is 7.5 hours. The average age at Telerik is ~26 years. Across the Telerik product teams, there are over 120 MCPs. Telerik is maintaining the highest level as Microsoft Gold Certified Partner since 2005 and has 4 Gold and 8 Silver Microsoft Competencies.

Community at Telerik is important, too. We have built one of the largest communities in the .NET world with more than 500,000 registered users. At Telerik there are 7 Microsoft MVPs on staff. In 2010, Telerik sponsored more than 200 developer user groups, code camps, and charity development events around the world, donating software, money, speakers, and cool .NET Ninja swag. To help make sure every user group has access to high quality speakers, Telerik sponsors 17 Telerik Insider Speakers that deliver presentations to user groups of all sizes – no size-discrimination! :)

Many of the above numbers have changed with Telerik’s growth. The only thing that has not changed since we started in business is our #1 priority - to “deliver more than expected”.

Reflections on the .NET world

Vassil Terziev — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:00:00 GMT

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 for the next release of JustCode to the first 500 people that send us an e-mail at decompile@telerik.com. No need for any special format - your name and (optional) some ideas on what decompilation features you would like to see most would be welcome.

Silverlight vs HTML5 - WTF?

Vassil Terziev — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:02:57 GMT

It has been a wild weekend for sure. A slew of important announcements at PDC, sudden withdrawal of all Silverlight sessions, Bob Muglia’s statement about Microsoft’s change in plans, the uptake from journalists, the community uproar... A comedy of errors was unfolding in the technology space while I was happily spending my weekend enjoying my kid’s birthday and not thinking about dev platforms.

So, I come in the office today and my inbox is blinking like crazy, mails from a ton of people from inside the company and out and the common question is – what are you/we doing with Silverlight? Is this the beginning of the end? Are we going to abandon Silverlight now that it was declared dead? Is HTML5 the future of web development?

In short - we love Silverlight, our customers love it and we don’t see it dying, nor will we abandon it. Silverlight might benefit from some improvements, but is not dead and will not die that easily. It might not be the “premier” UI technology of Microsoft (whatever that means, I never really understood that message) but it will thrive in many types of applications. Perhaps Microsoft raised the expectations too high when they announced Silverlight a few years ago and its benefits were blown out of proportion. I guess many people expected that there would be nothing but Silverlight.

Just like now I am defending Silverlight and building a case for it, back then I was building a case for HTML and JavaScript. Many people were trying to convince me that Flash and Silverlight will dominate the world and that HTML will disappear. Thing is, HTML is like WinForms. It will be around till the end of the world. It survived and is coming back stronger than before. I believe the same will happen with Silverlight. We’ll see, time will tell. While Microsoft has marginalized many of its own “children” in the past, it has also changed its initial course many times based on market/community pressure.

While you could argue forever who is going to “win,” I don’t really understand why people put HTML5 and Silverlight in the same basket and don’t separate the future of Silverlight from the future of the internet. In a way, it feels like people talking about a championship clash between New York Yankees and Manchester United. True, both teams play sports, both of them are great, but… they don’t compete in the same sport. So it’s kinda’ difficult for them to have a face-off so that you have a clear winner.

This brings me to my main point – Yankees fans do not want to watch another sport when their favorite baseball team is playing (the same applies to Man Utd soccer fans) any more than developers want to use another technology when they like the one they’re using. HTML5 and Silverlight may both be development platforms, but they have very different approaches and they appeal to different audiences, hence they don’t really “compete” for the same championship.

I hope you are not shocked! That’s what our data shows – web devs never picked up Silverlight as their platform of choice. They always stayed close to what they felt most comfortable with – JS, HTML, CSS, AJAX. Sure, they suffered from cross-browser issues due to the fact that every browser has its take on how “standard” features should be implemented, but they stayed true to pure web development and never embraced Flash or Silverlight.

On the other hand, our data shows that Silverlight appeals mostly to people coming from the WinForms world. For them, it’s the transition from WinForms to the next-generation world. Silverlight might be the super media platform, but most of our customers are not using it for that and don’t appreciate it for the HD streaming. These people were doing WinForms development and were looking for ways to enjoy richer functionality and simpler deployment of the backbone apps of their organizations. They found the Silver bullet and saw the light! With the blossoming of Silverlight, I think we finally get the best of both worlds when it comes to LOB – the ubiquity of the browser, the rich experience, the online and offline scenarios, and the great languages and tooling (well, that’s as of recently and we could definitely use some improvements).

Further, I don’t think that you can build with HTML what you can build with Silverlight with the same effort. You can build amazing stuff with any technology if you are a great developer and you know the domain. The real problem, and hence test, for any developer technology is how easily it enables less experienced devs to deliver amazing results. In my opinion, SL’s threshold is pretty low and it has the best cost/value, especially when you are talking about internal applications of medium size and complexity and up.

Silverlight will become dead if and only the hundreds of thousands or millions of devs who are doing desktop apps today decide that writing JavaScript is cool and that they can achieve more with HTML5-capable browsers, tooling and platforms than with Silverlight or some other similar technology. I honestly don’t see that happening, though, and believe in the merits of SL when it comes to development of heavy-duty LOB apps for the Enterprise.

As a short summary - have no fear, dear customers. We plan to continue investing heavily in both HTML5/CSS and Silverlight; stay tuned to our Silverlight team blog for regular roadmap updates. You know you can count on Telerik to follow the latest development trends and your needs. Last week we introduced Windows Phone 7 suite (1^st in industry!) and you can be assured we will be there for you for HTML5, too (stay tuned to Telerik blogs for more on that soon). We will not “retire” WPF or WinForms; just see what we are delivering to you next week with the Q3 2010 release (WPF, WinForms). We are an infrastructure provider so whatever the market needs, that we will deliver. We believe that customers should be the ones to decide what to use and when. Our responsibility, and business, is to provide them with the absolutely best tools no matter whether we get tail of headwind from Microsoft and we will stay committed to everything we have started.

And a closing word of advice – choose your tools based on your skillset and your company’s needs rather than on emotions based on mass hysteria.

Silverlight 4 memory leaks, Telerik controls and a solution

Vassil Terziev — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:02:00 GMT

As most of the people doing XAML development already know Silverlight 4 shipped at Mix 10 this year. This official release contained a lot of issues (memory leaks included) and it was a reasonable decision for Microsoft to postpone their GDR (general distribution release – the one that comes with Windows Update) version. A few weeks ago, Microsoft finally shipped the GDR. One of the things all developers hoped for was a resolution to the known memory leaks. The GDR did fix a lot of memory leaks, however, it did not address all of them and there are still some with a severe impact.

Memory leaks in Silverlight 4 and their impact

We have identified and reported to Microsoft two major memory leaks in Silverlight 4 GDR:

Template binding to a custom dependency property in a Popup’s Content.
Inline DataTemplate, instantiated via DataTemplate.LoadContent() method.

Before answering how we have addressed these issues let’s look at what is the impact of each of them. The first issue’s impact was huge. A lot of our controls were using Popup’s including: RadComboBox, RadMenu, RadRibbonBar, many buttons and pickers. If you have just used any of these controls without even data-binding it is going to leak. Not only the control itself will leak, but the whole page that the control is used into will leak, because it has a strong reference to the control. Regarding the second issue the main control that was affected was RadGridView, because it allows users to customize each column’s appearance via data templates. Fortunately Microsoft have provided early on an “official workaround” to use Static Resources instead of inline data template definition. This will require a change on your side, but after all it is a doable operation.

Microsoft did acknowledge both problems (SL forums) and Tim Heuer said that they do have a fix but he could not commit to when an update (or another GDR) will be available. As customers were experiencing a lot of pain with this (TELERIK forums), and we were affected internally as a number of Telerik products such as TeamPulse heavily utilize Silverlight, we decided to take immediate action regardless of the enormous effort involved.

Fixing Silverlight 4 memory leaks or how to fix the unfixable

Luckily, our team has been successful in fixing both of the above runtime memory leaks in the Telerik code base:

Fixing the Popup leak was not an easy task. We have developed a number of prototypes including custom attached dependency properties, attaching/detaching the Content of the Popup in code behind and even implementing our own Popup. Finally we have settled on the option with our own Popup, because it was the only one that was not leaking. We have changed all our controls to use this new Popup control in their Templates. We have modified all our themes to reflect this change as well. This means that if you have custom styled control from the above leaking list you will have to change your Templates as well to use the new Popup control. For example our online demos is using highly customized version of our controls and we have to modify its theme as well in order to avoid the leak. The end results is what drive us – memory leak free controls and online demos.
Fixing the inline data template was easier. We have implemented the code based workaround proposed by Microsoft in our products. This ensures that if you are still using inline data templates the respective control will not leak. We still advice you to use StaticResource when applicable, but don’t worry if you are not. We have you covered.

Preventing future memory leaks

Memory leaks are one of the nastiest problems you can have in an application and we’d like to spare our customers. While we did save the day, the more important question is how do we ensure this does not happen again (or can we even make such a claim?). In order to prevent future memory leaks we have developed our own micro unit tests framework that covers all of the above leaking scenarios. We are going to expand these unit tests covering more and more use cases in the future.

What’s next – our 2010 Q2 Service Pack 2 release

We have always tried to stay close to our customer and address their problems early on. In this ongoing process we have introduced the concept of Latest Internal Build which allows you an early access to our internal continues integration builds containing fixes that you have reported.

We have pushed a new official service pack release which will have all known memory leak fixes packed. We know the high price for fixing a bug and this is the reason we have delayed this servicing release. Rushing to the first working solution and not evaluating other possible approaches that we might have taken is something that we will not do. As you know the only way to go fast is to go right. You can download the latest files under your accounts' Downloads - RadControls for Silverlight section

If any customer experiences further memory leak issues, please share your comment here or at the forum thread that I listed above.

Telerik Wins Microsoft Partner of the Year for Central and Eastern Europe

Vassil Terziev — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:16:39 GMT

I am proud to share that Telerik won the Microsoft Partner of the Year award for the CEE region in the ISV category with its Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS product.

This award feels very special as we competed with hundreds of companies and some really great products in the ISV space. It's also coming for Sitefinity, a really great web CMS product that is powering the sites of many renown companies (just check out our gallery to browse the 1,000+ showcase items) but which had not won too many major awards so far, unlike Telerik developer tools products which have received hundreds of industry awards throughout the years. What is even more inspiring is that the best is yet to come as the new 4.0 version that will ship in the fall is such a great continuation of our quest for the CMS Holy Grail - how to create a system that is equally loved by developers, marketers and IT people.

You can find out more about the other winners at:
http://digitalwpc.com/Regional/Details/CEE

Telerik wins “Best of TechEd” award in the “Components and Middleware” category

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:53:14 GMT

Wow, this is a big achievement and we are extremely proud of it. This is perhaps the culmination, in terms of public recognition, of several years of intense R&D and the result of our “Best of breed” strategy. While many vendors focus on breadth, our goal has always been to be the leaders – from the smallest component to the complete experience of using a suite that spans over the whole .NET stack.

Thanks to all customers for the endless support and patience. We couldn’t have done it without you. As usual, we can only promise that this award will not make us self-content or lazy – it will serve as an even bigger incentive to innovate and make you more productive and successful.

Ok, now off to work as we’ve got a lot of great things coming up. And check out the beta of JustCode. It’s got quite a few new features, including the much anticipated unit test runner.

Riding waves

Vassil Terziev — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:52:00 GMT

While I typically refer to our journey of the last 8 years or so as a roller-coaster ride, another analogy is better suited: that of surfing. The waves of opportunity keep coming in one after the other and we, as one of the surfers, are enjoying them. Surfing and business, like everything else, starts with many difficult and painful moments. In the beginning, you barely hang yourself on the board, you fall off too often, you hit yourself. After a lot of practice and perseverance, you start riding small waves. And then you constantly go for bigger and bigger ones. As the French proverb goes, “appetite comes with eating”.

Thinking of this, I am taken back a few years ago when we first tried to go for a bigger wave. We wanted to go outside of our comfort zone and try something different and more challenging and we launched our Reporting and Windows Forms UI products in 2006. We ventured into unknown reefs and waters and… it was a painful experience. We had many challenges, but we did not give up. We learned how to surf in such conditions and we put on more body muscle to withstand the challenges better. True, it took us a lot of trial and error, but three years later I am very proud that we have market leading products. We became better at our surfing and we started enjoying the thrill of riding bigger waves.

Many other releases followed – Sitefinity, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, JustCode, and so on. But it felt like changing the resort and not changing the conditions in which we ride. We knew how to ride good sized waves but it didn’t change the skill level required.

Today it is a big day for us as we are on the verge of going out into new oceans and surfing new, bigger waves. Having just announced our new JustMock tool, the introduction of our Silverlight rich text editor and many other big changes throughout our existing product line (in March), today we unveiled two new Telerik product divisions – Automated Testing Tools and Team Productivity Tools.

What was started as a partnership with ArtOfTest transformed into a “marriage” recently and Telerik will be offering testing solutions to both developers and QAs. We hope that we will be able to bring the same level of innovation and fast evolution to the world of Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX and MVC testing. Just as we did with developer tools so far.

Another partnership that started off as a small side project with our friends at Imaginet grew into TeamPulse, our new product for Agile Project Management. It’s an amazing Silverlight 4 application that connects the agile and lean development principles to Microsoft TFS and which can make your planning a joy and can improve your team performance as well.

It deserves to be noted that both of these product lines were born from a real need first and market opportunity second. We simply were not able to find the proper solutions for many of the QA and collaboration challenges Telerik was facing as a global and quickly growing organization. And, as usual, we decided to act on it with the belief that most probably other organizations are also facing the same challenges and that the solutions to our problems might be solutions for them as well. Some recent research, such as this one from Forrester, tells us we weren’t wrong. We are now very comfortable with the foundation we have created for growth of future Telerik divisions.

It’s a really big wave for us. And we are very thrilled about it because we have been preparing for this moment for quite a while.

Like all of the times before when we have done something radically different from what we were known for, we’ve dedicated a lot of thinking and hard work to ensure that we don’t jeopardize our existing business. Over the years, with anything new we’ve done, customers rightly asked aren’t we spreading ourselves too thin. Today I would respond to that in the same way I did several years ago when we first ventured into new territories - you should expect only improvement and nothing less, across old products and new ones. The 220+ people that were working on developer tools will continue to do so and will serve you with the same dedication. If you look at our roadmaps and recent release cycles, you will clearly see that we’re getting better, and faster, at creating value for our customers across all product lines and that the quality bar continues to rise with every release. We are growing and have expanded our operations to support our growth. But at the same time we are staying true to our roots and our original beliefs that you should never let your existing customers down in pursuit of new opportunities.

Getting back to the surfing analogy, I’ve always been a great fan of Laird Hamilton (link to Wikipedia + YouTube) and I hope that someday we will be able to achieve in the software world what he has achieved in the ocean and not be afraid to ride in the most turbulent waters that have the biggest waves in the world.

Are you ready to go into deeper waters together with us?

Vassil Terziev
Co-founder/CEO

http://twitter.com/terziev

2009 in review

Vassil Terziev — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:40:00 GMT

When you don't blog regularly, one of the biggest challenges is to find a good topic. With Twitter around, it becomes even more complicated for the people that are not regular bloggers. While I was waiting for something interesting to pop-up as a topic, 2009 almost passed and it gave me the needed opportunity. It feels as if I blinked and it's Christmas Season again.

Before I move on with my overview, on behalf of everyone at Telerik, I would like to wish you and your families a better 2010 – stay healthy, happy and lucky. Thank you for being a part of the Telerik community and for bearing with us in good times and in bad

2009 was not an easy year – all of us, in differing severity, felt the hit of the economic slowdown that affected most of the world. It was the first time we as a business had to take into consideration macro factors and not just the things that are typically within our control. Yet, it was also an amazing time – in terms of new experiences and results achieved. Luckily, with the efforts of all the talented people at Telerik and with your incredible support, we overcame all challenges and emerged stronger – with more and better products and ready to “deliver more than expected” in 2010 and beyond.

Even though this year had a lot of economic uncertainty all around, we still accomplished almost everything on our roadmap plus a few extra things:

Introduced the Telerik ASP.NET MVC Extensions. Contrary to popular belief, the MVC extensions were not a port of our ASP.NET AJAX products but a new development started from the ground up. It was also the first time we released a Telerik product under an open source license (using GPL 2.0).
Telerik significantly extended the Silverlight and WPF product lines. Today, we have an amazing set of controls with which you can create pretty much any type of application. After the initial rush to provide features, we spent a lot of time to also deliver unmatched performance. It was a big engineering challenge but a good investment. I won’t go into controversy who’s grid is the fastest – you can test everything on the market and see which product performs fastest in your case.
We were the first to provide support for Microsoft Silverlight 4.0. It shows how committed we are to closely following Microsoft releases and allowing you to leverage the latest and greatest products coming from Microsoft and not lose the productivity you get from our tools.
We brought to market the first Silverlight reporting engine by virtue of extending Telerik Reporting capabilities.
Our mature product lines, RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and WinForms, got many new controls and performance improvements, as well as much better looking skins. We also spent several months to ensure that all controls are much more easily styled and to provide tools for customers to make customizations to the skins visually – that’s how the Visual Style Builder was born. And we are in the final stages of revamping the WinForms Visual Style Builder.
OpenAccess got many improvements and is getting closer to our vision for the product. In 2009 we focused on providing really broad LINQ support and the close to 200 tests (101 LINQ examples is just a small subset) is a true testament that we have one of the most feature-rich and LINQ capable solutions on the market.
At PDC 2009 we released our first Visual Studio productivity plug-in “JustCode”. While JustCode is not as feature complete as the tools of our competitors, it shows our commitment to this space and it does deliver quite a few unique features such as solution-wide code analysis, JavaScript refactoring, and many others. Oh, and it’s much much lighter on your machine’s memory.
This year we also shipped the Work Item Manager and Dashboard. Developed in partnership with Imaginet, these tools were intended mainly for internal purposes but everyone was so excited that we finally decided to offer them as a free download to our customers. It’s a great showcase of Telerik WPF technology put to heavy-duty use. And it’s useful as it makes working with VSTS more enjoyable.
In 2009 we also managed to enter into a strategic partnership with ArtOfTest and our WebUI Test Studio product was born. Apart from selling it, we are also using it extensively across our teams for ASP.NET AJAX, MVC and Silverlight test automation (in addition to our unit testing efforts of course:)
We delivered the first truly accessible editor for SharePoint content editing. You can take a look at the RNIB case study on YouTube. It’s a great case how technology can help for something good.

We are extremely proud of every single item but the really important questions is not how we feel about our products, but instead how you feel about them? Did we get better? Did we deliver the value that you expected? Did we add the tools you wanted to see from us? Please share your feedback below and help us serve you better in the year to come.

Vassil Terziev
Co-founder/CEO

Telerik, Oslo and “RAD Make My Application" button

Vassil Terziev — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:46:59 GMT

I always joke to our team that our tools need to be so easy that Zarko (Co-CEO of Telerik) and I can build an application by pressing the “RAD Make My Application" button. A while ago some of you also voiced the need to have “RadDoEverythingForMeForTheRestOfMyLife”. While we are hard at work to provide more and more value with every release for all of our current product lines (and the new ones in development), we are always on the lookout for tools and technologies that would help us deliver the “RAD Make My Application Button”.

The good news is that we, and the evolution of technology, will make it a reality at some point. Today it’s just simple prototypes but I’m pretty excited for the future and what 5GL languages will bring. While fourth-generation programming languages are designed to build specific programs, fifth-generation languages are designed to make the computer solve a given problem without the programmer. While you can argue whether the new Microsoft Oslo platform and M language can be considered a 5GL environment, they definitely do make things easier and allows developers to model the intent of users more closely. What’s even better, Oslo is a new model driven development paradigm and allows the model to be executable by a runtime, as opposed to a static Visio diagram, CASE diagram, or drawing.

Microsoft has been adding to the Oslo SDK some exciting stuff. For example, you can create a domain specific language (DSL) for XAML/WPF with Oslo. In fact someone at Microsoft did that already, so I can type in plain English the following:
Give me a Window
    whose Name is W
    which has a StackPanel
        whose Name is Sp
        which has a TextBox
            whose Name is tb.

Sp has a Button
    which has a Binding
        whose Path is Text
        and ElementName is tb.

Sp has a TextBox whose Text is "Hello Oslo".
tb's Width is 400 and Height is 300.
tb's Background is LightGreen.

And get this XAML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<wpf:Window x:Name="W" xmlns:n0="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/composite-font" xmlns:wpf="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
<wpf:StackPanel x:Name="Sp">
    <wpf:TextBox x:Name="tb" Width="400" Height="300" Background="LightGreen" />
    <wpf:Button>
      <wpf:Binding Path="Text" ElementName="tb" />
    </wpf:Button>
    <wpf:TextBox Text="Hello Oslo" />
</wpf:StackPanel>
<wpf:Window.Background>
    <n0:LinearGradientBrush x:Name="l" StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="1,1">
      <n0:GradientStop Color="Yellow" Offset="0.0" />
      <n0:GradientStop Color="Red" Offset="0.25" />
      <n0:GradientStop Color="Blue" Offset="0.75" />
      <n0:GradientStop Color="LimeGreen" Offset="1.0" />
    </n0:LinearGradientBrush>
</wpf:Window.Background>
</wpf:Window>

Pretty cool, right? One step closer to a 5GL and the "RAD Make My Application" button!

Since Microsoft has released Oslo, our engineers have been busy on their spare time (just weekends, they work nights as well to bring you the great tools!) building some tools that we would like to share with the community. They are both live on Telerik Labs as community tools that you can play with and work with.

The first one is a LINQ to M implementation. The Telerik LINQ to M implementation allows the developer to use pure LINQ statements with blocks of M values, pure text or the results of a transformed DSL.

The second is a Telerik Oslo Comparison and Migration tool. The Telerik Oslo Comparison and Migration Tool allows developers using “May CTP” to compare two M source code files (or groups of files) and view the differences with a Visual Diff. Once a developer sees the differences they can determine if their new code will break their existing applications and choose to merge the files or discard the changes. Developers can also compare M in the Microsoft Oslo repository and perform the same visual diff and merge capabilities. A future version of this tool will also allow the developers to migrate one version of the repository to another.

Are we sure that Oslo is the next big thing? No. Is Oslo the cornerstone of Telerik’s future? Not yet. Are we excited by its capabilities? You bet. Go ahead and take Oslo out for a spin and when you do, remember that Telerik will be there to provide tools for you along the way. Just let us know what you think and share your opinion.