Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Latest internal RadControl builds now available on Telerik.com

Here's a new feature on Telerik.com that you may find pretty useful. Over the holiday break, Telerik launched a new tool on Telerik.com that enables you to download the latest "internal" RadControl builds anytime you need them. "Why would I need an "internal" build?" you ask. Let me explain. Every day, Telerik receives lots of good feedback from you, our customers. Sometimes you report an important issue that needs to be addressed urgently, and our incredible support guys (up 'til now) usually supply you with a custom "hotfix" build that fixes the problem. Then, during the next service pack release, we roll-up all of these hotfixes (along with some other improvements) and ship an "official release." The problem with this approach, though, is that you may have a problem that somebody else has already reported and had fixed in a hotfix build. Wouldn't it be great if there was a place you could download "out of band" hotfix builds of the RadControls that contain all the hotfixes that have been applied since the last "official" release and instantly fix your problem? Now you can. The "Latest Internal Builds" tool puts the latest internal build of the RadControls at your finger tips any time you need to fix a problem in-between official releases. There are a few important notes about this tool to keep in mind, though:

  • These are out of band builds, which means they don't go through the full Telerik QA process. They are plenty stable to use for your active development, but they are not recommended for production environments (unless you're willing to accept the risk of using a build that's not fully QA'd).
  • These are not "beta" builds. These are regular continuous integration builds from our internal "FIXES" code branch. That means they only contain hotfixes for features in the last official release. They do not contain new features, and they are not a vehicle for previewing our work for future Qs.
  • These builds will not be updated daily, but they will be updated regularly. Only the latest build will be available online, so when you visit this tool and to download bits, you're always getting the most up-to-date, patched version of the RadControls that exists.
  • Only the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX are available through this tool now, but all RadControls and Telerik developer component wills be available here very soon. I'll update you when the other component suites are added.
We never like to see bugs in our official releases, but we recognize in a complex software world, sometimes bugs are discovered. Hopefully this tool will make the process of recovering from those errors as painless as possible and put you back on the road to developing great software with the RadControls!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Thanks to run this nice feature on telerik.com but I also like to see some other things like Status(Nightly, Beta or RC) ,

Known Issues of build ,...

I'm very interested in http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+4.5+Nightly+Builds

Best regards
Mostafa Anoosheh

Todd Anglin said...

@Mostafa- Yes, this is the important distinction for this feature. These are not "raw" nightly builds. Rather, these are "regular" internal builds that are published with the latest hotfixes. Therefore, they will never be Beta, RC, or Nightly. They will always be "Hotfix." We will ship different builds (via a different process) that preview our -new- work being done for future "official" releases. This tool is only for getting the most patched versions of current releases.

Hope that makes sense and helps clarify the purpose of this tool.

-Todd