Viewing the Online Examples

The company's online examples show every control and how to use these controls effectively in your own applications. While it's obviously part of their marketing effort, it's worthwhile for your own training, too; the examples help you understand how the controls will react in your own applications. You might decide to buy an individual control for a specific need, rather than purchase the entire suite.

What I found most interesting about the online examples is that you can view the source code for any of them with a simple click. In fact, you can view the example in any of the languages that the product supports. Consequently, you can even make a comparison of how difficult it will be to use the product with C#, rather than with Visual Basic.

The Telerik code, help files, and utilities all have good documentation. In addition, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Telerik setup program didn't mess up my Visual Studio help file as so many products have done in the past.

Accessibility and Standards Compliance

Many governments are now stressing the importance of accessibility and standards compliance for Web pages. Many people have special needs, and require accessibility features to use the Web page at all. Fortunately, you get the pizzazz provided with the Telerik RAD Control Suite without sacrificing either accessibility or standards compliance. This level of compliance is unusual in product suites today; normally, you have to choose between compliance and pizzazz.

Telerik meets both the Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) accessibility requirements. Adhering to these two standards make it quite likely that anyone can access your Web site with ease. Of course, you still have to do your part by implementing the RAD Control Suite features according to Telerik guidelines and following the prescribed accessibility standards yourself.

Standards compliance comes in the form of one of the latest World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, XHTML 1.1 Strict. Providing standards compliance ensures the controls will work with a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Mozilla. You can find a complete list of browsers that this product supports, along with any limitations here.

The RAD Experience

Using the Telerik RAD Control Suite does allow you to create impressive results in a short time once you know how to use the product. I found that the product works exceptionally well once you get it configured and learn about the few quirks it contains. However, you can't install and use this product to create applications immediately. Take time to read the help file and study the example applications. Otherwise, it's almost certain that you'll get lost trying to use even the simplest control.