Vassil Terziev's blog

Telerik, Oslo and “RAD Make My Application" button

Vassil Terziev — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:46:59 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.

Why doesn’t Telerik offer phone/IM support?

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:27:53 GMT

Telerik is well known for the high quality of its support organization and customers are overall quite happy from our responsiveness and helpfulness. Nonetheless, from time to time we’d get inquiries why we are not offering phone support, chat or GoToMeeting as part of our regular support services. After answering several inquiries over the last few months, I decided to blog about it and let everyone know why technical phone support is not offered (at least at present).

I’d first like to make a distinction – there is a huge difference between general/pre-sales phone/IM support and technical IM/phone support. We do offer general and pre-sales phone support and it’s working out pretty well. But it’s a different story with phone support for technical issues. As I told one customer, it would be tough for Telerik to offer this type of service when I and many of the other senior people at Telerik are not believers in it. It’s not that we are against it altogether or that we are absolutely happy with the way things are at the moment– it’s just a matter of being unable to see it working in an environment like ours. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a staffing issue – it’s our view that phone/IM support does not deliver and that we can do more harm than good by introducing it (even if customers pay premium for it).

So what kind of technical issues does phone support solve well? Few things that come to mind based on our experience:
1. Setup
2. Installation
3. Licensing
4. Basic issues

My strong opinion on this one is that these types of issues simply should not exist! They are killing the customer experience at a very early stage and they should be tackled with super high priority and dedication from the product teams. No kind of phone support can offset the customer frustration when it comes at such an early stage. That’s why we have always tried to fix things that into those 4 categories and in a way not give customers reasons to pick up the phone for such issues (not that we haven’t failed in some cases like the installation process of Sitefinity but it’s all valuable learning lessons).

All other issues related to programming errors, exceptions, browser issues, etc cannot be solved by phone support efficiently in my opinion. While phone support might work out very well for cable TV or the phone company where there's a limited set of things that can go wrong, that's hardly the case with dev tools. In our case you have lots of OS systems, lots of .NET variations, different browsers, controls that can get used in myriads of ways, other non-Telerik packages in the project and ... customer code. How can you troubleshoot an "Object expected" error over the phone? Phone support is good for escalation and for toning down an aggravated customer who wants to hear a human voice but it doesn't go beyond that point. I actually think this is the greatest benefit of phone support, not the ability to solve tech problems (and that type of support we offer even if we don’t advertise it or charge for it).

Just as we are producers of software, we are heavy buyers of software and, as usual, we face problems with pretty much everything we purchase. So far, for nearly 10 years I have not been able to talk to a knowledgeable person on the phone, even for installation issues. Every time I had to spend a lot of time on the phone, and then follow up with an e-mail AND screenshots AND the same explanations I gave over the phone and I would never receive timely help. I'd be very lucky to have a solution on the same day. My experience as a user had led me to distrust phone support. There is also one really big problem with IM and phone support - what kind of people do you put on the other end of the line? Do you put a non-experienced person who needs to search through resources and get help from others to find an answer or you put an experienced person who knows the products inside out and can help immediately? The first option is ineffective - that's what most companies do and that's why they fail. The second doesn't make business sense most of the time - that would mean putting your best people to do phone support and not putting them to work in creating new products and improving old ones.

The above applies for chat as well – you either put really good people to answer questions, or you don’t do it at all. I’ve had numerous occasions when the people on the other end knew less than me and it wasn’t really inspiring to educate the other person rather than do the opposite.

Customers also ask why we don’t offer GoToMeeting as a standard service? GTM is much better for solving customer problems and we occasionally use it when we need to see the local environment of the customer and it's some obscure problem that's hard to reproduce. The problem with GTM is that it takes a lot more time than the answering of a ticket and in 90% of the cases the ticket solves the problem. Time is of essence for us as we get a lot of customer mails each day. If we have to hold GoToMeeting sessions with every customer, explain basics, fix non-Telerik related issues, provide general dev guidance and so on, we would have to charge a lot more for our services and for the greater population of our customers that would be a problem. It's also much harder to link to a GTM session and the ticket allows you to more easily create written material that can help other customers too.

We believe that our current approach works best for us and for customers despite the deficiencies it might have. With all the resources we offer our goal is to teach you how to fish and in case you can't do something, you can rely on us for further help. In more than 80% of the cases we provide a reply within 7 hours and in the majority of those cases, the first reply solves the issue at hand. Moreover, having customers in over 100 countries, it will be really hard to arrange GTM sessions which are convenient for everyone.

For those interested, we do offer extended support services. If customers are stuck with a problem and are keen on having GoToMeeting support for their respective issue, they can take advantage of the Telerik Consulting Express (http://www.telerik.com/consulting/consulting-express.aspx). It’s an on-demand service offered through one of our partners Falafel Software. It’s a very good option when you need expert advice on best practices, architectural guidance or you simply need an expert by your side to solve an issue. The folks at Falafel have lots of high-end dev experience with Telerik tools and they are on top of their game so you can be sure it’s money well spent.

I hope my notes will help customers understand our reasoning for leaving things the way they are. And I do want to stress that we keep thinking all the time how to make our support services better, how to to cut down our turnaround time, reduce the number of posts it takes to resolve an issue, etc. It's just that we haven't found (yet) an economical way to offer GTM for all customers. And for chat and phone support - we have not found a good example of a technology company with high support load that offers great phone support.

What’s your take? Do you have any success stories for phone support that you’d like to share? In what cases has phone support and instant messaging been really helpful?

Come see us at TechEd 2009

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:28:00 GMT

If you are attending TechEd, be sure to say “hi” to the members of the team who will be there. Todd Anglin, our head of Developer Evangelism, will be running Birds of Feather sessions on building great web applications:
http://telerikwatch.com/2009/04/join-me-at-my-teched-bof-sessions.html

Stephen Forte, our Chief Strategy Officer, will try to break his personal record of 10 TechEd sessions by doing 11 (you read it right - eleven!) talks this time. Here's his schedule:
http://www.stephenforte.net/PermaLink,guid,d1e24c20-eff1-48e4-a0e8-7dbad80994f8.aspx

If you try to locate the Telerik booth, you'll notice that there isn't one this year. Unlike many others, we choose not to send marketing and sales people to trade shows. We only staff our booths with some of the most experienced people in our technical organization, as well as members of the senior management at Telerik. And in light of the upcoming Q2 release, which is packed with new stuff and improvements, we decided to give our PMs some “trade show” rest. You’ll soon see why we did not want to distract the dev teams and take their valuable time away from our pending projects.

As a token of consolation (and partly because I'm trying to stay true to my style), I'd like to share a screenshot of one of our Secret Projects. Details? Well, it’s a really cool WPF application... Not enough? Stay tuned and we’ll have more news about it in the coming weeks.

We will be sure to welcome you at our booth @ PDC and if you are coming back to Los Angeles, so we look forward to seeing you then! And if you are looking to talk with a Telerik representative, Todd will be at the Microsoft “Ask the Experts” Web Experience booth and Steve is easy to find after his sessions. You can also find him at the “Ask the Experts” SQL booth or at “Speaker Idol” where he will be a judge.

Telerik, AJAX UI controls and Mono support

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:32:57 GMT

Had I posted the big news yesterday, many people would've probably thought that it's an April Fools' Day joke. Luckily, it's not a prank and we are very excited to announce that RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX works on the latest distribution of Mono.

Telerik customers have been asking us for Mono support since 2006 and we have been quietly working with Novell to make it happen. After many rounds of feedback and fixes, we are very happy that our collaboration yielded great results - now customers can make their ASP.NET applications truly cross-platform. It's a good time to say a BIG "Thank you" to the people on the Novell team who worked really hard to make Mono support a reality.

You can read the full press release here: http://www.telerik.com/company/press-center/company-news/telerik-announces-support-for-mono.aspx

And on Novell's website: http://www.novell.com/sv-se/news/press/mono-project-continues-to-advance-net-development-on-linux/

And the best for last: several hundred ASP.NET AJAX UI control examples running on Mono 2.4 can be accessed at http://mono.telerik.com

Enjoy! And don't be shy to share your feedback.

Another new Telerik product - conundrum

Vassil Terziev — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:59:40 GMT

We'll be releasing a new product for Q1 and will be posting a ton of details about it in the coming weeks. Before that happens though, I thought I'd give everyone a chance to win a very special, limited-edition Telerik T-shirt. All you need to do is to provide a correct answer to the riddle below (which can give you some clues about the new product but you still need to be a bit creative):

"I am a product of art

Your capabilities I'll test

And put all worries to rest

In Visual Studio I run

And using me is fun"

Enjoy!

p.s. Please use real names that I can identify in our database so that I can dig your address and send you the T-shirt.

Happy New Year to Everybody!

Vassil Terziev — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:13:21 GMT

Time does fly fast! More than a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the then upcoming 2008 and just a wink later it's already 2009! Last year was one that passed by at light speed... I've noticed that when you are at work and you're focused on the daily grind, you often see only the challenges and think about how slow you are progressing. It's great that there are holidays when you slow down a bit and you have time to look back and see that things are much different.

At New Year's Eve my wife and I were reminiscing about what had happened during 2008. Needless to say, being able to pause and take everything into perspective regarding Telerik was very special – 3 new product lines (ORM, Silverlight and WPF), 2 acquisitions, solid growth of the team, Top 5 SME Employer award again, participation at numerous industry events, opening of a German office, strategic investment partnership with Summit Partners, and many many other notable things.

It seems that 2009 won't be much different. You'll continue to enjoy new exciting things from us. I feel very tempted to share some details but I will not spoil the surprise. For a person who's not really good at keeping secrets, all I can say is that in the last challenge I ran on this blog there were 0 correct answers. So, it will be very entertaining for all and perhaps enlightening to an extent, to read your predictions for 2009 in the blog comments below...

Before I digress any further, I'd like to extend our team's best wishes to all readers of this blog. Whether you are a customer or prospect, partner or competitor – we wish you all a great 2009! May the new year bring a lot of positive emotions to everyone. While it might not be the easiest period for many people and businesses, I am optimistic that we will collectively weather the storm.

Once again, Best Wishes for a Very Successful and Happy 2009!

The new telerik.com is LIVE! And it runs on Sitefinity!

Vassil Terziev — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 03:35:07 GMT

Even though we did not consciously schedule our Q3 release to occur during the US presidential election week, we now see the similarities between the election and our release. Just as the election is of historical significance to the US people, so too is our Q3 release for us. We managed to push our biggest release in time filled with major improvements and new additions and refinements across all existing product lines, an official release of our Silverlight controls, 3 major new controls for WPF (gauge, chart and scheduler) and, last but not least, the first release of our newly acquired OpenAccess ORM product.

But that is not all – we unveiled something that had been in the works for several months – the all new telerik.com website.
I think everyone on the team had not been as excited as we are today for a very long time. Today marks an end to months of hard work to transition our old website to one entirely based Sitefinity. The project required a lot of time and dedication for most people in the company to create and sort through the myriad wireframes, designs, re-designs, website synching, images, content re-writes and, as you can imagine, lots of extra code lines we put in order to fully tie in and migrate all of our resources. Despite the long road and the numerous challenges we had to face along , it has been a great experience to extensively use our UI components and Sitefinity for the new website. We believe that eating our own dogfood is essential in validating the quality, viability and trustworthiness of any of our products product and I have to to make all products better along the way.

Another great thing about the whole project was that we were able to validate Sitefinity as a very flexible development platform. . It truly showed how old code, written properly of course, can be re-used seamlessly within Sitefinity. And I have to say it - working with in Sitefinity as an end-user is a pretty fun experience.

We also plan to make a series of blog posts about the whole project and publish some of the wireframes, earlier designs, and discuss some implementation details such as the advanced caching techniques we are using for the site (and which will soon ship with Sitefinity).

Our goal was a more elegantly designed Telerik.com that adheres to trusted UX standards and offers better & structured content. We hope that apart from the visual appeal and user experience you will also appreciate one particular major improvement of the new website – its speed. We spent a decent amount of work to ensure that the new site performs significantly faster than before. There are some areas that are still a bit heavy, but those will be overhauled very soon. And make sure you use the new search – expect it to produce better results faster. Just as with every release, there were some small glitches and we continue to work around the clock to address them.

We hope you like it. As usual, you are all invited to comment. Things could be a bit shaky in the next few days but we will fix it and we are counting on your patience and feedback to make things better.

And enjoy the Q3 release!

Telerik OpenAccess ORM licensing and pricing

Vassil Terziev — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:58:30 GMT

Immediately after word got out that we acquired Vanatec, customers started asking us what are our plans for the tool, how much it is going to cost and whether they would get it for free or they would have to upgrade.

While we will be releasing information about our future plans for OpenAccess and will publish the ORM roadmap in the weeks to come, I wanted to make a quick note about licensing. The good news for customers with an all-inclusive subscription is that they will get the tool free of charge, as well as any updates that are out during their subscription. The even better news is that we will not be raising the prices of the all-inclusive license due to the ORM addition and you will not be “forced" to renew at a higher price when your subscription expires.

The Telerik OpenAccess ORM will also be offered separately for $399 per developer seat. The subscription license will run at $599 and just like the subscriptions for the UI controls will come with a full year of updates and source code.

We're [Feed]burning - update your RSS readers

Vassil Terziev — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:05:26 GMT

Last week we decided to start syndicating via Feedburner in order to better track the readership of the Telerik Blogs. The updated URL of the main feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Telerik.

A new product from Telerik?! Oh, what could it be?

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:12:48 GMT

We'll be releasing officially a very exciting new product in Q3 2008. The game is on - would be fun to see your comments. If you provide a correct answer, you will get a cool Telerik T-shirt:)

Telerik Reporting courseware available for free download

Vassil Terziev — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:32:28 GMT

Our friends at Falafel did it again - they created an amazing step-by-step guide for Telerik Reporting customers. The extensive document will walk you through the product, highlight its capabilities and provide in-depth information about databinding, styling, expressions, sorting, filtering, design-time and much more. Coming to nearly 200 pages, the courseware comes with a lot of code snippets that will show you the true power of our report generator engine.

The courseware is available for free download at http://www.telerik.com/support/self-paced-tutorial.aspx

Enjoy! And keep the feedback coming.

Stephen Forte goes to US Congress

Vassil Terziev — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:02:28 GMT

Yesterday was a big day – Stephen Forte, our Chief Strategy Officer, was in the US Congress! Besides talking about Telerik, our quest for global software domination and the Bulgarian-American friendship, Stephen was there to comment on a very important and pending issue: should US government modernize its systems and ensure that heaps of historic information are not just stored but are also accessible. In essence, Stephen urged them to move away from mainframes so that they can start using our tools:)

Here’s what Stephen and the others had to say in the discussion (article from Washington Internet Daily):

Government Urged to Modernize to Save Historic Data
-- by Alexis Fabbri

Moving government data from legacy to modern systems is costly but necessary, speakers said Monday at an Association for Competitive Technology event. Lack of interoperability between new networks and obsolete technologies like magnetic tape mean "we can all read the Declaration of Independence but might have trouble opening a Word document from 1984" of possible historical importance, said ACT President Jonathan Zuck. ACT, a technology lobbying group, was founded in 1998 in response to the Microsoft antitrust case.
Decades' worth of historical data are "stored in ways that we can't access," including magnetic tapes and even punch cards, Zuck said. Change "feels risky and complicated" with "a lot of unknowns associated with it," he said. More study and research into where and how agency data are stored would help "put to rest" some of "amorphous and scary aspects," Zuck said. "More interoperability is probably worth spending some money, time and effort," he said. But agencies and lawmakers "haven't acknowledged the growing risk" of leaving data in obsolete forms and the need to find strategies for "bringing data forward over time," he said.
That key data worth archiving might be inaccessible is "something that taxpayers deserve to know," Thomas Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said. Markets still exist for mainframes but there's "not much competition," he said. IBM controls "just about everything related to mainframes," Schatz said.
Some state governments are innovating, Schatz said. Texas is moving to a network- based electronic filing system that cuts filing time and requests for hard copies, he said. The North Carolina Highway Patrol spends about half the time on reports than the previous 276 hours a year, he said. "We don't need legislation to get this done" at the federal level, Schatz said. Agencies simply need to step up, he said.
It's time to make the move, said Stephen Forte, chief strategy officer at Telerik. "To some degree it's a ticking bomb," he said. As systems and technologies age, parts and repair technicians grow scarcer, he said. Many magnetic tape makers are out of business, "a creeping problem," he said. "You'd have to build drives to read those tapes," reversing rather than progressing, he said. "For government, there does have to be a massive migration process" but "fast forward" a couple of years "and the government could get that return" on investment, he said.

PowerShell Professional – power to the people!

Vassil Terziev — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:24:08 GMT

As Hristo Deshev is quite busy working on getting the WPF beta shipped, I thought I’d make a small plug that his book on PowerShell is available on Amazon! Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Windows-PowerShell-Hristo-Deshev/dp/1590599403/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210281519&sr=8-1

Unlike many of the others books on the topic, Hristo’s goal was to make things more practical and teach readers not what PowerShell is but rather how it can be beneficial for them in many common scenarios.

So, if any of you buy Hristo’s book – PLEASE share your feedback on Amazon.

Another year, another 10 awards from asp.netPRO Magazine

Vassil Terziev — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:24:05 GMT

Just found out (from Telerik's homepage:) that we have done pretty well in this year's asp.netPRO Reader's Choice Awards - 10 awards overall, one in each category in which we participated. Even though there's nothing more gratifying than a demanding, happy customer, the fact that we've collected 2 dozen asp.netPRO awards in the last 3 years is a reason to open up a bottle of champagne.

I would like to thank all of you who voted for us! Thank you so much! We appreciate every single effort you guys make - from voting in the annual magazine awards, to submitting a bug or a feature request. We will not disappoint you and we will keep our edge in the ASP.NET space with the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. And on top of that, we'll continue to help you discover how powerful the products are. Very soon we will introduce some amazing training content that will help you make complete, visually engaging, highly responsive UIs faster than ever before. After all, we now have to live up to our reputation as the winner in the "Training" category.

I would like to finish my blog post with a big "Thank you" to the amazing team at our partner Falafel Software. Their team has contributed immensely to our efforts to provide industry-leading technical documentation and training materials to the community. So, if any one of you needs training on Microsoft tools and technologies, or you need to get more knowledgeable in Telerik tools, I would wholeheartedly recommend you contact the professional team at Falafel.

Stephen Forte joins Telerik

Vassil Terziev — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:05:00 GMT

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Stephen Forte will be joining Telerik as Chief Strategy Officer.

A bit of background for the people who don’t know who Stephen is: he is a long-time Microsoft MVP (13 years!), dasBlog founding contributor, Microsoft Regional Director for NYC, former CTO of Zagat, one of the greatest speakers in the world, and above all, a remarkable person for whom I’ve always had great respect.

In his new role Stephen will be helping Telerik to choose the right path and ensure that you, our customers, are always in the center of our product strategy.