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Top Dev Tool Categories

I was surfing the Devdirect site, which seems to list every new software development product release ever made and I ran across two interesting lists: The top 10 best selling products and the top 10 software categories by sales. I realize that these are snapshots and may just reflect one day's sales, but I found them intriguing.

The top 10 products actually had a couple of surprises:

  1. ASPPlayground.NET SQL Forum
  2. Color Tab Control .NET
  3. SpreadsheetGear 2010
  4. RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 2010
  5. RadControls for WinForms Q2 2010
  6. RadControls for Silverlight Q1 2010
  7. Telerik Reporting Q2 2010
  8. GdPicture.NET
  9. Diagram Editor Tool for VB, .NET and VC++
  10. 3-Heights™ PDF Viewer

The predominance of the Telerik RadControls and reporting products probably has more to do with their recent release than market dominance. But it does suggest that programmers are still primarily interested in control toolkits -- not much different from the days of Visual Basic 3. But it is interesting that a tool as specialized as one designed to create forums in .NET for SQL Server databases can outsell the more general purpose tools.

The top 10 categories reveal an even more traditional perspective:

  1. Calendar, Date & Time
  2. File Upload/Download
  3. Graph & Chart
  4. Grid
  5. Image Acquisition
  6. Image Processing
  7. PDF View
  8. Reporting, Report Writers
  9. Scheduling & Diary
  10. Tab & Tabstrip

I suspect that these would have been the top 10 categories ten years or even twenty years ago when I was a Visual Basic programmer (well, maybe not the File Upload control).

Posted by Peter Vogel on 08/17/2010


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