About How-To-Select Guides

Welcome to the How-To-Select Guides

You'll find product reviews elsewhere, but not here. Our How-To-Select Guides focus on the product categories with product information in context helping you quickly become a category expert and ensuring they have a long shelf life. We also plan do revise each guide biannually to keep up with changes in the category.

Our Goals for the How-To-Select Guides

We set forth several goals for our How-To-Select Guides. We wanted them to be:

• Clear & Concise - Quick to read and easy to comprehend.
• Accurate & Unbiased - Completely Defensible among leading experts with as little bias as humanly possible.
• Exhaustive, Thorough, & Complete - Covering all options include commercial, shareware, freeware, open source, and even coding techniques; all decision points and aspects of potential concern; and including all currently available products in the category.

They are Living Guides

I think you'll agree we've come very close to achieving our goals. But we are only human and there are aspects we forgot, ones we didn't realize were important, and ones we probably omitting. But that's okay because our Guides live on at http://forum.howtoselectguides.com. There you'll find lively discussions about this and many other categories. Visit often with your questions about selecting components or tools for .NET.

Help us create your Ultimate Selection Resource

We know our How-To-Select Guides can save you time and help you avoid costly mistakes but we need your help to make them even better:

• Subscribe - Subscriptions are free, so sign up on our website to receive each Guide as it's released.
• Tell Others - If you know .NET developers, send them a link to http://howtoselectguides.com and suggest they subscribe too.
• Mention in Newsgroups - When you answer questions in developer newsgroups and forums about components and tools, mention and include a link to our Guides.
• Blog about a Guide - If you blog and are inspired by our Guides, mention and include a link to that Guide.
• Ask Questions - If our guides don't answer a question you have, ask it in the forum so one of our authors and your fellow .NET developers can answer the question for you.
• Answer Questions - Answer questions asked in our forum by of other .NET developers, which also helps others with the same question.
• Make Suggestions - If you notice anything we can improve about our Guides, post a suggestion in our forums.
• Offer to Write - If you are a category expert, or want to become one, and you are a good writer willing to meet deadlines, offer to write one of our future Guides.
• Encourage Vendor Participation - Tell vendors being included in relevant Guides is a prerequisite for considering purchase of their products.
• Support our Sponsors - Please consider supporting the companies that sponsor and/or advertise in our Guides.

Thanks for reading about our new How-To-Select Guides, and I hope our current and future Guides will both save you time and make sure you make the right selection!

Oh, and don't forget to subscribe!

Sincerely,
Mike Schinkel
Publisher — How-To-Select Guides
mike.schinkel@howtoselectguides.com