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Steve Hebert's Development Blog » asp.netPRO magazine releases Readers Choice Awards
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asp.netPRO magazine releases Readers Choice Awards

asp.netPRO magazine has released their "Readers Choice Awards" and there are some interesting results. 

In the category of "Best QA/Testing Tool", Red Gate's ANTS Profiler went from taking 6% of the vote last year to 42% (and first place) this year.  Meanwhile, telerik's r.a.d. menu tied for 1st place with Component Art Menu for best navigation control. I've used the r.a.d. menu through another product and I've been very impressed, however I haven't looked at the Component Art tool.   

I thought it was interesting that discountASP.Net received best hosting honors, I've been using these guys for over a year now and I've been very happy with their service.  And the best Forum Software award goes to Community Server by Telligent Systems (the same software that drives the CodeBetter site).  Community Server hammered their competition with 42% of the vote. 

The award I question the most is the "Best Add-In" award - it's far too generic a category.  CodeRush winning over DevPartner Studio is comparing apples to oranges - from my understanding of CodeRush it doesn't compete against DevPartner Studio but they could be complementary tools. I haven't used CodeRush at all, so I'm not sure if they can be used together.

Other code I'd love to play around with includes the Dundas Chart and ChartFx.  I've used ChartFx in pre-.net code and reviewed the Dundas Chart application before VS.NET 2003 was released.  Both are impressive products, but at the time the pricing model was too restrictive for our role-out scenario.  I'd also like to check out the NetAdvantage 2005 product to understand exactly what they have to offer.

 

 

Posted 05-06-2005 8:51 PM by shebert
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Comments

Sam wrote re: asp.netPRO magazine releases Readers Choice Awards
on 05-07-2005 9:52 PM
When we needed a charting control for a website last year I looked at several and finally settled on dotnetCharting. The main reason was the ease of use. You can start whipping out really nice looking charts in a few minutes with it. Pie charts were a little confusing, but I was able to easily write a helper that allowed me to use the same datasource (a dataset) for the grid on the page displaying sales leads, a bar chart showing how many leads per day were coming in for the last 30 days, and a pie chart to break down the current status of the leads (sold, in progress, scheduled appointment, awaiting callback, sold, declined, etc).

I used the Infragistics 2004 suite and didn't care for it. It felt like you had to learn a new API when they could've easily stuck with established semantics. For example, why should layout=fixed prevent you from sizing columns properly with the WebGrid? Plus if you didn't know how to use it well, it was rather easy to produce errors client-side, which is just not cool. Of course a lot of people like the product, so maybe I just needed more time with it.

Of course Resharper should beat CodeRush hands down. :)
shebert wrote re: asp.netPRO magazine releases Readers Choice Awards
on 05-08-2005 11:29 AM
Hi Sam,

Thanks for the note on dotnetCharting, I'll have to check that out. My biggest gripe with charting tools has been that they want to charge per-site or per-server - which is a problem when you are selling a product that is deployed per-instance of the application. But then again, that's a problem I don't have anymore.

I was really surprised Resharper wasn't in the best Add-in list or perhaps it was part of the 46% of "other" responses. The article also doesn't mention how many responses they actually had - so I'm not sure how representative it is.
Christopher Steen wrote Link Dump - 3
on 05-09-2005 7:44 PM
Link Dump - 3