I have a client who is a programmer with a small company that is creating a really cool on-line product. And I mean kew-well!

His background is very strong in architecture and also he and his team have done a ton with WinForms but his ASP skills hark back to the pre.NET days. But he’s doing the app in ASP.NET 2.0 and I am mentoring him with this and a variety of other related things.

Along the way, he was frustrated with some of the limitations of the built in ASP.NET 2.0 controls (a post for another day). Even though I have never used them, I knew that based on the particular tools he was seeking, I have heard such great things about telerik from people I trust, so I recommended that they be on the top of the list of 3rd party controls to check out. Needless to say, the report back from him is that he is now using 3 or 4 of those controls and is so happy that he’s (no, not buying the company) but subscribing to their full package.

A few weeks later he was ready to start synching between his development sql server and he online sql server as he got deeper into his tests. Though I have only played with them a little, I am still quite familiar with Red-Gate‘s tools and also know so many people (that I trust) who think they are awesome. So once again, I gave him a strong recommendation to try them out. A few days later, I got another very happy email from him saying that the Red-Gate tools were fantastic and he is definitely sticking with them.

There’s a lot to gain from just knowing what’s out there and paying attention to what people say about them (and who it is that’s saying them and what the context is) even if you don’t have hands on experience with every tool out there.

So thanks Red-Gate. Thanks telerik. (And thanks ASPInsiders, too.)

p.s. no, this is NOT a sponsored post! 🙂

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