Finally Using Telerik's r.a.d. Controls

If you don’t know them already, Telerik is a tremendous supporter of the developer community.  They provide scads of licenses of their software for raffles at user group meetings and code camps, and they’re extremely generous with sponsorship funding for those same things.

I got a copy of their r.a.d. controls for ASP.NET over a year ago when they began the relationship with our .NET group; however, I’d not been in a spot to put the tools to the test until now.

I’ve been working on developing a custom field type for MOSS.  The type involves reading in a tree of information from a single table, doing some manipulation and display of the node data, then saving out an XML fragment of the tree’s state.  I was looking at the work involved to handle loading up the heirarchy from the database and manipulate it in a regular TreeView control and I wasn’t overly thrilled — my ASP.NET experience is, uh, well, not extensive.

So being a lazy SOB at heart, I took a quick look at the telerik RadTreeView control — and quickly convinced the manager I’m working on this project for that the control made great sense.  In the space of a few hours I had a fleshed out prototype done that had most of the functionality I needed wired in.  It would have taken me several days instead of several hours had I written all this by hand.

For full disclosure’s sake keep it in mind that telerik gave me these controls when they started sponsoring our group.  That said, I’d be ebullient about the controls regardless of whether I had to spring for them or not.

I’m looking forward to making more use of these tools in the near future.

(Also, telerik’s got several other lines of controls for reporting, WinForm applications, SharePoint, and DotNet Nuke.)