Overview
Country or Region: Bulgaria
Industry: Professional services—Software engineering
Customer Profile
Based in Bulgaria, Telerik offers tools, components, and content management solutions for software developers. The company employs more than 250 people.
Business Situation
Telerik customers wanted better support for custom application development, and they were looking for new collaboration tools. Also, Telerik wanted to be able to update its products more often.
Solution
Telerik implemented Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, and it integrated the software into its own solutions.
Benefits
Supports custom Microsoft Silverlight development and testing
Increases team collaboration and productivity
Helps Telerik extend functionality / / “With the Silverlight designer and hierarchical work items in Visual Studio 2010, our customers will spend less time …. Developers tell us they can now do in several hours what used to take several days.”
Todd Anglin, Chief Evangelist, Telerik
Telerik, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, provides development, automated testing, and team productivity tools, as well as UI components and content management solutions for Fortune 500 companies and other enterprises. Its customers were looking for more support for Microsoft Silverlight development and better collaboration tools. Telerik also wanted to offer new and updated products more frequently. To address these issues, the company implemented beta versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. Telerik updated its existing tools to work with Visual Studio 2010 and developed a new collaboration product based on the software. Now, Telerik customers can develop custom Silverlight applications and increase both collaboration and productivity. Developers say they can now complete some tasks in hours instead of days.
Situation
Telerik, headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a leading software vendor that provides developer tools and UI components based on Microsoft software. The company also offers testing solutions designed to help developers and QA professionals improve the automation and quality of UI testing.
A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Telerik helps its customers work productively to build dynamic, reliable applications on time. “We help developers who use Microsoft .NET technologies to save time in all stages of application development, including planning, development, construction, and testing,” says Todd Anglin, Chief Evangelist, Telerik.
Thousands of enterprises in more than 90 countries, including Fortune 500, educational, and governmental organizations, rely on the company’s products for the delivery of Web and desktop applications. Many of these customers are increasingly developing applications based on the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in, including the new Silverlight 4. As a result, Telerik wanted to provide full support for that development. Anglin says, “Because our customers are already early adopters of Silverlight 4, we knew we had to offer them new products that would help them be productive in designing with that technology.”
Telerik also sought to help its customers stay current with other Microsoft software. For example, many Telerik customers plan to upgrade to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system. “We want to support new technology, and support it early and often as it evolves,” says Anglin. “For our customers, that means we need to ensure that our tools work well with Visual Studio 2010.”
Specifically, Telerik customers were looking for integrated collaboration tools that provide added functionality inside the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 environment. “Development teams need a way to more easily create and manage work items, so they can work together better and more productively,” Anglin says.
Additionally, Telerik hoped to find a solution that would help it quickly deliver feature-rich products. “We wanted to respond faster to customer requests for new and updated features,” says Anglin.
Solution
In August 2009, Telerik started to deploy beta versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. The company was very interested in the fully integrated support for Silverlight application development in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. The software includes a new visual design surface, which makes Silverlight development simpler than before. Developers can use this surface for editing and dragging and dropping UI elements.
Also, Telerik wanted to take advantage of the Visual Studio 2010 extension manager, which developers can use to add, remove, enable, or disable Visual Studio extensions. With this feature, developers can easily download and install extensions, such as new controls and project templates for Microsoft ASP.NET and Silverlight, from Microsoft and other vendors. Telerik also hoped to improve workflow with the richer work item linking provided by hierarchical work items in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.
After implementing the beta software, Telerik used it to develop Telerik TeamPulse, a new agile planning solution. TeamPulse integrates with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 via a customized engine that synchronizes work items, areas, and iterations within a TeamPulse data repository. TeamPulse users can work with requirements and establish delivery plans outside of Team Foundation Server. Because the synchronization is bidirectional, changes made to work items in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 are automatically replicated to the TeamPulse store.
Telerik also enhanced its free tools, Telerik TFS Work Item Manager and Telerik TFS Project Dashboard, to provide support for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. By using TFS Work Item Manager, developers can add and edit work items or save queries in real time. TFS Project Dashboard captures workload information and displays it as indicators such as build history, recent check-ins, assigned tasks, and bug history.
In addition, Telerik improved its JustCode productivity tool to provide support for Visual Studio 2010. This development add-in gives developers real-time solution-wide code analysis and error checking, smart code navigation, and refactoring capabilities. It can even analyze code across multiple programming languages.
Telerik integrated its WebUI Test Studio Developer Edition with Visual Studio 2010 for easier testing. The company also used Visual Studio 2010 to update its Telerik Visual Studio Extensions product, which provides a menu of extensions that developers can use to quickly configure projects to work with Telerik tools.
Benefits
By using features in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Telerik can help its customers ease development, boost collaboration, and increase productivity. In addition, the company is able to be more responsive to customer requests.
Supports Custom Silverlight Development and Testing
The new integrated Silverlight support will help Telerik customers develop Silverlight applications more easily. “We can integrate the Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate directly into the UI components we deliver, so our customers can see real-time previews inside Visual Studio 2010 and can customize their Silverlight applications,” says Anglin. “This is huge for us, and one of the major reasons we want to see our customers adopt Visual Studio 2010.”
Along with Silverlight development, Telerik customers will be able to build test automation for Silverlight 4 applications without leaving Visual Studio 2010. The Telerik WebUI Test Studio Developer Edition integrates tightly with Visual Studio 2010 to offer the first scriptless Silverlight UI test recorder. Tests are visually recorded and can be customized with C# or Microsoft Visual Basic .NET or converted to unit tests.
Telerik customers will also be able to use enhanced features for configuring data bindings and other Silverlight properties. “These features, along with the new Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010, represent a major step forward for our customers in terms of their ability to be more productive when building Silverlight applications,” says Anglin.
Increases Team Collaboration and Productivity
By taking advantage of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 features such as hierarchical work item linking, Telerik has been able to introduce Telerik TeamPulse, which helps increase developer collaboration. “TeamPulse provides a highly collaborative environment, giving teams the ability to selectively publish requirements and release plans to Team Foundation Server in time for construction, which is where Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 really shines,” Anglin says.
The integration of Telerik TFS Work Item Manager and Telerik TFS Project Dashboard with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 also improves productivity. “Our customers are all eager to use hierarchical work items in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010,” says Anglin. “This will make it easier for their developers to organize, group, and manage work items. For example, they can create a work item for a task like updating a Web site UI, and then very easily relate additional work items to that parent item. That will make it simpler to keep related work items together, which in turn helps developers be more productive in their planning and organization.”
The new solution will help Telerik customers save time during their application development processes. “With the Silverlight designer and hierarchical work items in Visual Studio 2010, our customers will spend less time building UIs and managing work items, so they will be able to focus on actually building applications,” says Anglin. “We have already heard developers tell us they can now do in several hours what used to take several days.”
Helps Telerik Extend Functionality
With the Visual Studio 2010 extension manager, Telerik can further enhance the functionality of its Visual Studio Extensions product. “We can now send customers our extensions as Visual Studio 2010 packages, which makes deployment easier for us and also helps us update these tools more often and be more responsive to customer requests,” says Anglin. Telerik customers will have an easier way of managing these packages and greater control over enabling or disabling features. “Our customers will not have to run a full Telerik installer as they have in the past, in order to access our extensions,” he adds.
For both Telerik and its customers, the features in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 will help increase the overall efficiency of development. Anglin says, “Developers who are taking advantage of the built-in enhancements in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 also have an improved experience working with our tools, so these technologies are mutually beneficial.”
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated development system that helps simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, modeling, and design tools that help you bring your vision to life. Work within a personalized environment that helps accelerate the coding process and supports the use of your existing skills, and target a growing number of platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and cloud services. Also, work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that you can use to find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high-quality solutions.
For more information about Visual Studio 2010, go to: