Telerik's Premium Collection for .NET, this year's recipient of the Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Application Libraries and Frameworks category, is both deep and wide. It's deep in that the components included deftly handle a significant number of common developer needs. It's wide in that the covers the range of Microsoft platforms including ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Forms, and WPF. Telerik rounds the package out with additional libraries for report generation, object relational mapping, and code analysis.

There's the usual array of customizable, skinnable editors, trackbars, tree views, menus, grids and so forth. There is also an impressive set of charting, scheduling, and data visualization components. We Jolt Award judges were particularly impressed with the Telerik Presentation Framework that lets you achieve WPF-like visual effects in standard Windows Forms applications.

Most people these days are socially conditioned to view beauty as being only skin deep and not the basis for making quality assessments. So while it's tempting to be impressed by just the sheer appearance of the components (the company has clearly invested in aesthetics), we also found that the various project wizards and smart property inspectors simplified the work of implementation. We also liked the company's uncomplicated licensing scheme, its vast online support offerings, and the very complete collection of sample code that can jumpstart your own development work. Congratulations Telerik