2010 DevProConnections Community Choice Awards

DevProConnections 2010 Community Choice Winners Table

The Windows developer ecosystem is rich and flourishing, if the results of the DevProConnections Community Choice Awards are any indication. Community Choice (formerly called Readers' Choice) is DevProConnections annual award program, where DevProConnections readers select their favorite developer products from a list of products nominated by the developer and vendor community. This year, just over 2300 members of the DevProConnections developer community cast more votes on products in 26 categories, spanning a spectrum encompassing add-in tools, to code editors to various components, controls, content management systems, hosting services, specialized tools, and more. The results featured some familiar names, such as Microsoft, Developer Express, and Telerik, along with products in a new SharePoint Development category.

Winner Highlights
Two strong contenders, Developer Express and Telerik, continued their longtime rivalry in this year's voting, taking the gold and silver awards, respectively, in the Add-in, Charting/Graphics, Component Set, Grid, Online Editor, Printing/Reporting, Scheduling/Calendar, Silverlight, and Utility categories. Additionally, Developer Express won the gold award for Community Resource (for its DevExpress Community Site) and Free Tool (for DevExpress Data Editors Library), while Telerik took home the gold for Navigation Control (Telerik RadMenu for ASP.NET AJAX), SharePoint Development (Telerik AJAX Controls for SharePoint), Testing/QA (Telerik WebUI Test Studio), and Training (Telerik Training).

SharePoint Development on the Rise
This year's awards acknowledged the growth of the Microsoft SharePoint developer community, with the addition of SharePoint Development as a new product category. In this category, following Telerik AJAX Controls for SharePoint are silver award winner ComponentOne Studio for SharePoint and bronze award winner Nevron SharePoint Vision.

Worthy of Mention
Voting was close in some of the categories. Most notable is the tie for the silver award for Email Control, between Chilkat Software's .NET Email Component (this is the first year Chilkat has been represented in the awards) and IP*Works! S/MIME. For instance, Microsoft Outlook 2010 and Skype got a respective 41 percent and 37 percent of the votes for Communications Tool. Voting was also fairly close among the three top products in the Community Resource category—DevExpress Community Site, StackOverflow.com, and CodeProject.com, which respectively garnered 22 percent, 19 percent, and 16 percent of the total votes in that product group.

This year's award winners include some products and vendors that have not been represented in previous years' awards. Among them are Chilkat Software, as mentioned; GoDaddy and Microsoft Windows Azure, which won silver and bronze awards, respectively, for Hosting Service; Devart dbForge Studio for MySQL, which took the bronze award for IDE; and CKeditor, which took bronze for Online Editor.

And the Winner Is… You!
In the end, it's you—members of the Windows developer community—who are the beneficiaries of the effort that vendors invest in development and marketing of their products. Products succeed when they meet a genuine need in the market and, as your Community Choice selections demonstrate, there are many products doing just that for Windows developers.

Anne Grubb ([email protected]) is developer content manager for DevProConnections and its associated publications.