Award winners announced

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 VSJ Reader Awards, based on votes submitted on the VSJ website. These awards, which entitle the winners to sport the VSJ Reader Awards 2008 logo, are particularly important because of the way they reflect real-world perceptions of what is of value to developers. Voting for products isn’t just a matter of choosing from a shortlist – instead each participant in the VSJ Reader Awards decides independently which companies or products deserve recognition in each of the categories, based on the experience of actually using them. It is this open participation that makes this accolade especially valuable to the winners. So thank you to everyone who participated in 2008, and as the new year progresses do look out for the next crop of products that will deserve your votes for 2009.

• Overall best development tool/environment
  Winner: Visual Studio 2008
  Runners up: Eclipse, NetBeans
• Best web development software
  Winner: Visual Studio 2008
  Runners up: Expression, ASP.NET
• Best Java tool/environment
  Winner: Eclipse
  Runners up: NetBeans, JDeveloper
• Best design/management tool
  Winner: Visual Studio Team System
  Runners up: Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Subversion
• Best component developer
  Winner: Developer Express
  Runners up: Telerik, Dundas
• Best software reseller
  Winner: Grey Matter
  Runners up: QBS Software, ComponentSource
• Best development utility
  Winner: JetBrains ReSharper
  Runners up: .NET Reflector, NUnit
• Best training company
  Winner: DevelopMentor
  Runners up: QA-IQ, Learning Tree
• Best book publisher
  Winner: O’Reilly
  Runners up: Apress, Wrox
• Best web resource for developers
  Winner: Code Project
  Runners up: MSDN, Google

Your feedback counts

At the same time as getting readers’ votes for the annual reader awards, we also gather feedback about the content of the magazine so that we can plan future issues that provide articles that you want to read. As usual the overwhelming conclusion is that you want more of almost everything – in particular .NET programming (76%), C# (61%), database development and software architecture (53% each). As usual this is by no means balanced by topic areas that you want to see cut back. So we face our perpetual dilemma, given that the magazine has a limited amount of space, of trying to pack in as much as possible to keep every reader happy. Fortunately on the whole you continue to be pleased overall with the magazine: this year 97% rate VSJ as “Good” or “Excellent” (with most votes going to “Excellent”), 99% consider the articles well-written, and 99% perceive them to be technically accurate. As for the magazine’s design, 96% think the articles are well laid out and this year 87% of you like the covers.

Thank you all for your positive comments including…

• “A more detailed insight into technologies not easily accessible elsewhere”
• “Good technical depth”
• “Good walkthroughs with examples”
• “It’s pitched at the right level for me”
• “It contains interesting articles about both new and current dev tech”

…and one we’ll pass on to the book review team:

• “Reviews of really bad books!”

Even among the dislikes there were veiled compliments such as “Could do with being more frequent!” and “Not long enough! Add another 20 pages!”

Prize winners

There was as usual an incentive to complete the survey, with Bearpark providing a Universal Pass for DevWeek 2009, and O’Reilly kindly providing copies of 50 of its most popular titles. The names of the lucky winners are as follows, and the books will be dispatched by O’Reilly in the next few weeks:

• DevWeek 2009 Universal Pass – Dr Leslie Thelwall of British Airways
• Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails – Alan Gay of AVS Europe, Andy Kerr of Northgate Public Services, Andy Stevens of HSBC Global Asset Management, David Bending of Valtech, Hamish Hughson of the Royal Air Force, John Burgess of Risk Decisions, Michael Russell, Richard Bedford of Virgin Media, Steve Morris of Nokia, Vinod Kumar of Barclays Global Investors
• Learning C# 3.0 – Adrian Wragg of Logic Software, Alan Dixon of SolutionForge, Andrew Wright of NCR FSD, Gerald Krafft of Porism, John Machar of QinetiQ, Jonathan Jones of RWE IT UK, Kushel Vadgama of Pulse, Phil Kennedy of Total Systems, Shailesh Mistry of Peek, Stephen Head of EDS
• Programming ASP.NET 3.5 – A. Topa of Lloyds TSB, Andy Painter of Balfour Beatty, Daniel Kennedy of First Class Strategies, David Cox of Moneysupermarket.com, John Shuttleworth of Samson Solution, Mark Green of IRIS Software, Martin Cook of HBOS, Peter Elson of Manpower Software, Phillip James of Protocol National, Russell Hyde of Canada Life
• RESTful .NET – Alan Gairey of Tessella Support Services, Alistair Rose of RWE IT UK, Chris Leicester of 3rdbase, Cyril Madigan of CSC, Dan Hibbert of Linklaters, Geoff Cornwell of Pearson-Harper, Matt Brooke of Profile Analysis, Paul Thorpe of ITV, Robert Perrine of FS Walker Hughes, Robert Vale of Peerex
• SQL in a Nutshell – Brijesh Ammanath of Baldock, Bryony Mackenzie of The British Trust for Ornithology, Dave Kelly of Memco, Ian Logan of Straker Software, John Marcus of Marcus Systems, John Adams of John Adams Solutions, Mike de Mello of RBI, Sebastian Crewe of Sloane Robinson, Stephen Pearson of Greycode, Sue Heathcote of EDS