Telerik's Q1 2011 Major Release Stresses Windows Phone 7, Dev Productivity, and Data Access

Telerik, a provider of end-to-end software solutions for .NET development, has announced its Q1 2011 milestone release, which includes feature updates to Telerik's entire developer productivity line. The Q1 2011 release includes key enhancements in three main focus areas—UI, developer productivity, and working with data—that touch on different aspects of the software development life cycle, said Todd Anglin, Telerik's chief evangelist.

The first highlight of the Q1 milestone release is RadControls for Windows Phone, a set of UI components for Windows Phone 7 application development. "In RadControls for Windows Phone, we're shipping everything included in the beta, plus data visualization controls," said Anglin. With the Phone 7 controls, "developers will have the opportunity to get applications out into the market quickly and ride the wave of Windows Phone 7 growth."

I asked Anglin whether he thought Windows Phone 7 could potentially take the lead in the enterprise smartphone market. "Despite the lead that some other smartphone platforms have, Microsoft is an important provider of tools for enterprise developers," Anglin said. "With .NET and Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 offers [Microsoft platform] developers a very familiar platform for developing applications. We think 2011 will be a growth year for Windows Phone 7. But ultimately, I don't think the enterprise will be the exclusive market for Windows Phone."

In the second key area of Telerik's Q1 release, developer productivity, Telerik has enhanced JustCode, its Visual Studio productivity plug-in. The most noteworthy enhancement, said Anglin, is the addition of a decompiling capability, so that "without leaving Visual Studio, developers can explore assemblies of code they didn't write." Additional enhancements to JustCode include a code cleaning feature, which applies a consistent formatting to code written by different development team members, based on user-defined settings, and code style sharing, which makes it easy for development team members to create and share style settings.

As part of the third main area of the Q1 release, data development, Telerik has redesigned the visual designer of OpenAccess ORM, its object-relational mapping (ORM) tool. Anglin said that OpenAccess ORM offers a data-access alternative that combines the simplicity of LINQ to SQL, which Microsoft no longer supports, with the power of Entity Framework. In addition to the enterprise version of OpenAccess ORM, which supports SQL Server as well as non-Microsoft database platforms, Telerik is now offering a free version of OpenAccess ORM that supports all SQL Server versions as well as a tool to enable developers to convert applications using Entity Framework or LINQ to SQL to OpenAccess ORM.