Frameworks
The Readers Speak
You pick the best of the best in 2009.
For 17 years, we've conducted the annual Visual Studio Magazine Readers Choice Awards. And for 17 years, our expert readership of coders and developers has responded with a wealth of insight about the third-party tools and technologies that matter to them most.
Their input should matter to you. This year's VSM Readers Choice Awards are more than a simple popularity contest. The products that earn high honors in our survey have won the loyalty and respect of VSM's developer community, often over the course of months or years in enterprise deployments. And when it comes to savvy judges of developer tooling, few groups are more capable and opinionated than the 80,000 or so readers of VSM.
So what did we learn from this year's survey? For one, the scope and reach of major component makers continues to expand. Despite Microsoft's efforts to pump its homegrown components for evolving platforms like Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, companies like Dundas, Infragistics, ComponentOne, Telerik and Developer Express earned high marks from voters.
Also notable was the clear hunger for productivity-enhancing tools. In our survey, we asked respondents to identify the single most valuable and impressive tool in their toolbox. The top two vote getters in the Development Tools category-JetBrains ReSharper 4.5 and Developer Express CodeRush for Visual Studio .NET-were mentioned more than any other product.
The 2009 VSM Readers Choice Awards are in the books, but we're already thinking about 2010. Trends like cloud computing, services-based software and rich Internet applications are changing the way we develop software. So we want to know: How should we change the Readers Choice Awards to best recognize the most compelling third-party tools for developers? E-mail me at [email protected].
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.