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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Telerik wins a cookie!

I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to be working with Telerik (www.telerik.com) tools in my Visual Studio development environment for a while now, and I like them.  JustTrace, JustCode, and JustDecompile are fantastic development accelerators that should be an integral part of any serious developer’s toolset.  However, it was an experience with a recent software update that really set Telerik apart, in my mind, from any other software I’ve used to date.

Recently, Telerik has introduced a Control Panel utility that centrally manages the installation and download of their products.  It’s quite handy, and saves a great deal of time and effort.  While I was using it to process updates yesterday, the installation of Telerik’s OpenAccess ORM product failed.  I tried to update it once or twice more, through the Control Panel, and each time it failed, I used the “Send Feedback” button—thinking that perhaps the error was due to some flaw in the update, and maybe this report would be aggregated with others to help isolate a bug.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Unlike other software vendors, Telerik takes its feedback very seriously, and those simple little buttons that relay crash data back to vendors generally does nothing helpful for the user—unless you’re using a Telerik product.

Today, I received an email from Petar Raykov, in the Telerik support team, who not only personally identified my reports, but suggested—very kindly—that I should consider shutting down Visual Studio when I apply updates, because file locks were likely the cause.

Man, do I feel stupid and important all in the same breath.  Of course, I should have known to close VS2012; but didn’t think it would be a problem since I originally installed the components on my still-present VS2010 installation.  However, the fact that I was personally contacted by Telerik, after using just a simple button on the product to send off exception data, astounded me.  Compound that with the fact that I expressed no severity or need to address this problem, and what you get is the picture of a company that just cares about how its software works for you.

Thank you, Petar.  Thank you, Telerik.  You’ve earned the highest marks in my book for quality of service and support by being proactive and concerned about the basic experience of your product.  I will continue to recommend your line of developer toolkits wherever I go, and share this story as I do it!