About our Editorial Policies

The How-To-Select Guides Process

We begin the process of creating a Guide by identifying a product category we believe will be of interest people who care about one of the topic categories we currently cover. Next, we identify every solution — product or service — we can find that fits into the category. We then invite commercial product manufacturers and web application/service providers to participate and we require them to supply our writer(s) with a fully-licensed copy of their product(s) and/or full access to their service that they would provide one of their customers.

Editorial Policy Regarding Vendor Involvement

At the beginning of the process, vendors are invited to submit their opinion of what a developer needs to know in order to select a product in the category. Our writers then take that information and do their own research to produce an initial draft of a Guide. We give vendors an opportunity to review this initial draft and to submit factual corrections to the sections regarding their own products before publication. The final draft of the Guide is then prepared by our editorial team and submitted to the printer. We do not allow vendors to provide input to the final version of the Guide before it is published.

In additional, our policy is that once a vendor agrees to participate in a Guide, our decision on how to cover their product and what to say about it is final.

Funding the How-To-Select Guides

For the first few Guides, we made available only a single exclusive sponsorship to vendors in the Guides. These vendors supply their own promotional material for the sponsorship section as advertising content. On an ongoing basis, we will solicit advertising in the Guides allowing us to to fund the level of research needed to make our Guides able to meet the needs of even the most demanding developer.

Feature Charts

The feature charts in this Guide represent our best effort to pick out some of the most important features for this class of software and to indicate which products support which features. It's impossible to include every feature of every product in these charts, and it's impossible to capture the subtle differences between products with such crude delineations.

With that in mind, you should use the feature charts as general guides to help you find products that might meet your needs and not as the final word on a product's capabilities.

Editorial Policy Regarding Prices Published

Many of the products that we cover have quite complex pricing structures. For example, there may be separate prices for developer, redistribution, workgroup, and server licenses, for individual and quantity purchases, for named and floating licenses, and for perpetual or annual licenses. There may also be separate support or upgrade fees. In addition, many vendors offer discounts when you purchase their products through a reseller, or make promotional pricing available under certain circumstances.

Our policy is simple: we list the basic undiscounted list price for the least expensive fully-functional version of each product that we include in a Guide. You should always check directly with the vendor, or with your reseller of choice, for the most complete and current pricing. All prices are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated.

Reader Feedback

Although we strive to make each How-to-Select™ Guide as complete and correct as possible, we recognize that nobody's perfect. Products change, people invent new techniques for solving old problems, and sometimes we just make mistakes. That's why we revise each Guide on a regular basis. And that's also why we invite your feedback to help make the next edition of this Guide even better.

How-To-Select Guide Reader Forums

One way to get your feedback directly to us is to participate in our Web-based reader forums. You can visit the overall forum for the How-To-Select™ Guides at http://forum.howtoselectguides.com/ or the one for this Visual Studio 2005 Guide specifically at http://forum.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/vs2005/. Any content related to the Guide is welcome, but we're especially interested in the following areas:

• What questions do you have that aren't answered in the Guide?
• What new scenarios are you finding in your own work that we ought to include in the next edition?
• What other products should we consider including in the Guide?
• What areas of the Guide need correction or clarification?

In addition, we'd like you to upload your own "How-To-Select™ Case Studies." If you evaluate two or more of the products in this Guide, please take a few minutes to write up your scenario, what you learned, and why you chose the product that you did. Your fellow developers will thank you!

E-mail Feedback

If you prefer, you can also send your feedback directly via e-mail. If you've got feedback on any of our content, or just want to get in touch to tell us what you thought of our coverage, we'd love to hear from you. If you're willing to have your feedback reposted to the online forum, you can contact our writers and editors at feedback@_NOSPAM_howtoselectguides.com. If you prefer, you can use feedback-private@_NOSPAM_howtoselectguides.com to send private feedback that we won't publish. We regret that we cannot promise a personal reply to every comment, but we will carefully consider all feedback in preparing the next edition.