How-To-Select Guides - A Great Idea

Some of you have probably seen some mentions recently of Xtras new How-To-Select Guides popping up here and there. Well, here's another one. I believe these guides are going to be really useful, to developers or anyone else that has to go figure out which components have the features they require for their software. I know I've had to do it on several occasions in my career. It seems like just as you've settled on which component you are going to go with, you buy it, ....and then discover a component that would have been better suited for the job. These guides should help keep that from happening to you. I can't think of anyone better suited to run something like this than a company like Xtras, either.

I'm enthused to have been asked by Mike Gunderloy (who's probably been the editor for half the articles I've ever written) to author a couple of these guides. I'm currently working on a guide for "How To Select a Charting Component for .NET" which is going to feature around 30 different charting component vendors in the .NET space. I'll also be authoring a guide on "How To Select an Object-Relational Mapping Tool for .NET" which I think will be fun to write. If you want to get a feel for what the guides are all about , have a look at the first guide on .NET PDF Components.

In addition to writing some of the guides himself, Mike G. has assembled a talented group of folks to help write these guides, including Jay Kimble and Don Kiely. I'd also like to congratulate Mike Schinkel on  recently publishing the first of many guides recently. Mike S. has been at TechEd this week getting vendors to sign up to have their products included in the guides. I found it pretty funny that Jay has been "fantasizally" (is that a word?) there with him helping push the guides. Funny stuff.

UPDATE: It appears that Raymond Lewallen is also an author....awesome.