Welcome to the VSM Buyers Guide, your annual special issue that lists the astounding number of third-party products available to developers who use Visual Studio. In this issue, you'll find a comprehensive summary of the third-party products available for Visual Studio development. This year's list includes more than 450 products from nearly 250 vendors, broken down into 22 categories.

VSM believes firmly that third-party components and services are a terrific development aid. We believe their existence can save a company that uses them enormous amounts of time, money, and effort, enabling it to achieve many in-house solutions that simply wouldn't be possible otherwise. It isn't just that these tools can simplify development and give you more powerful options in your apps-they also push what is state-of-the-art for Visual Studio development.

The Buyers Guide is also the issue where we give you, the readers, a chance to tell companies how you like what they are doing. This issue also announces the winners of our annual Readers Choice Awards, which readers vote on in a carefully controlled survey. This year's categories span the range of tasks developers must grapple with, from the usual UI and charting and graphing components, to more service-based tasks such as finding a host for your ASP.NET applications.

Enjoy!