March Issue Preview: ComponentOne and Telerik TeamPulse
In March, we're going to round out our reviews of major product vendor suites by looking at ComponentOne's Studio for ASP.NET AJAX. It's a good time to take a look because
ComponentOne has got a new release coming out.
Well, actually, they've got a new release of their Studio Enterprise coming out: Every suite for every platform in .NET (and ActiveX, too). It's hard enough to review the component suites without reviewing suites in seven different technologies, at least some of which I'm not competent to comment on except as a beginner (e.g. Studio for Compact Framework). How to decide which suite to review?
It's not quite as arbitrary as rolling a seven-sided die (not that I own such a thing) but it's close. Fundamentally, I look at which audiences we've served recently and pick the audience that we've ignored the longest (and I also factor in the relative size of those audiences). So, if you're wondering why we're looking at the ASP.NET AJAX package, that's why.
In some ways that's too bad: ComponentOne has a new ReportViewer that they're obviously very proud of. I'll be looking at the ASP.NET version, but the press release from ComponentOne talks up the Silverlight version. I don't think it's likely that we'll have a chance to cycle back around to it -- so much software, so little time.
We'll also be looking at Telerik's TeamPulse -- an application lifecycle management tool. We've looked at other ALM tools, such as DynaTrace, Ants Performance Profiler and Sybase PowerDesigner, but it's been awhile since we've visited this topic.
The previous products performed very specific application management tasks, but TeamPulse is operating at a higher level: it's designed to "capture ideas and requirements,... and analyze project state." That's a big job. While I will look at the big picture, I'm going to be interested in how TeamPulse supports the individual developer. Does the product make life easier or harder for the programmer trying to generate code?
Posted by Peter Vogel on 02/18/2011