Telerik announced the Q3 release of its leading .NET development tools suite for use with its software application, lifecycle, and content management solutions. The company is advancing its existing toolset with touch capabilities, which now delivers major mobile, cloud and cross-platform enhancements, and analytics to more than one million developers.

The advancement includes integrated analytics in its WPF and Silverlight controls leveraging the EQATEC Application Analytics platform to provide developers with an intuitive, productive way to leverage Windows 8 functionality in environments with which they are familiar. The cross collaboration delivers on its promise to advance its superior UI controls, productivity tools and reporting tools. Developers now have the control to leverage important data such as application interactions, crash reports and feature usage, while improving the usability of their most important applications.

The new DevTools has additional support elements such as the company’s Backend as a Service (BaaS) offering, Everlive, is now integrated into its RadControls for Windows Phone. The new offering called Telerik Cloud Components enhances Windows Phone support. Developers can now integrate multiple scenarios such as user registration and login, picture upload, browsing, sharing and more using this tool.

The Q3 release is packed with enhancements facilitating web, desktop, mobile and cloud development. The company has integrated its hybrid mobile app development platform, Icenium, within the DevCraft Ultimate collection for .NET developer community to create and deploy iOS and Android mobile applications. In addition, Telerik has improved cross-platform needs for ASP.NET developers with the addition of Telerik’s component for Lightbox for easy image and template displays.

“This innovative DevTools release sets a new standard for developers looking to deliver consistent, high-quality applications across platforms with ease,” said Chris Sells, Vice President, DevTools division, Telerik. “DevTools continues to provide the ultimate .NET development experience, but with this update, has extended far beyond, offering incredible flexibility in meeting the exacting needs of users that demand applications delivered according to their platform and mobile requirements.”

The company has also released the RadCloudUpload control to enable ASP.NET developers to upload files for use with Amazon S3, Windows Azure, or Everlive without writing a line of code.

Some of the other features in Q3 release include support for Visual Studio 2013, scheduler for Windows 8 HTML, radial menu for Windows 8 HTML and XAML and Pinterest-like RadDataBoundListBox and RadCloudCalendar for Windows Phone. Telerik last updated its DevTools in June this year to include data visualizations for Windows 8, grid components, updated frameworks and data engines and improved UI controls.

The DevOps angle

Every time Telerik updates its DevTools suite there’s something giving developers and operations a greater ability to handle the ever-expanding responsibilities that DevOps put on development teams. In this update, the addition of expanded to-the-cloud controls and analytics really positioned DevTools as a go-to product for mobile development for any team.

Using DevTools controls that use RadCloudUpload a company can access external-cloud storage without needing to move the application back-end off premises–the server-side still stays in control, but the application on device can access cloud storage. This will give startups and enterprise teams some breathing room with cost by allowing 3rd party cloud storage to scale costs such as using Amazon S3, Windows Azure, or Everlive. It also lightens the load by making it simply snap-in to existing controls.

On the operations front, the introduction of WPF and Silverlight controls that can integrate increased analytics will give DevOps teams an increased ability to recognize and head off problems. EQATEC is now a division of Telerik and brings the fuel for powerful analytics.

This addition is expected to include usage analysis–what parts are users using, what parts are they not using–as well as exception reporting. Tying these two elements together, DevOps teams will get an idea in real-time if some portion of the remote app is having an issue (at nearly the same time users do) and as a result will be able to act on it before users even start self-reporting the issue.

With the addition of usage analysis, developer teams will be able to look over segments of their app to get an idea of how users navigate through it. A valuable insight into understanding why users might not be accessing some interesting section: perhaps they can’t see it on the screen, or the link doesn’t work, or most users go through a different page and never get back to that functionality. All of this is more easily inferred with better information about how users put the app to use.

Looking over this announcement, it’s obvious that Telerik is building up DevTools with the needs and interests of development teams in mind by not just making it easier to code in innovative tech such as off-prem cloud services, but through the integration of analytics services that will help keep the app running well and make customers happier.

Contributing authors: Saroj Kar and Kyt Dotson.