Third party control suite's for Windows Forms

Question

DevExpress or ComponentFactory's: Krypton Toolkit

I am looking for people's experiece with either.

• Ease of use(programmatically)?

• Accessability of help and support?

• User Community?

• Stability of controls?

• Ability to extend?

I am not asking anyone to Google it for me. I would like actual experience with either control suite(why I didn't put links to them ;)).

Both offer FREE windows Form controls so that is why I listed them both.

If someone knows of a different Control Suite that is FREE that I should consider as well that is great!

Answer 1

I've not used the Krypton Toolkit, but the last time I looked at it the visual quality seemed very high and the controls looked like they were easy to work with. I haven't used the DevExpress controls in a few years, but from what I remember they were very easy to work with but had very minor visual quirks when compared to the stock .NET controls.

What type of controls are you looking for? In my experience the "all-in-one" toolkit suites are usually not worth the price/effort. You are usually better going with the more focused products.

Answer 2

Both offer FREE windows Form controls

DevExpress' control suite is not free... you can only get a (small) subset of the suite for free. But I've been using it for over a year, and it's pretty good. The XtraGrid and XtraPivotGrid controls are especially useful, and you can customize almost any aspect (behavior, appearance...). The more basic controls (buttons, textboxes, comboboxes...) are less usefull, but they look nice.

• Ease of use(programmatically)?

  Not very easy at first... DevExpress' controls don't follow the same logic as standard Windows Forms controls, so it's a bit confusing when you start using them.

• Accessability of help and support?

  DevExpress technical support is pretty good, there is a big knowledge base of user questions. The support team usually answer pretty fast

• User Community?

  Not sure about that... I usually go directly to DevExpress technical support when I have a question.

• Stability of controls?

  The controls themselves are stable (I didn't noticed any major bug). However the designers are not completely reliable, and sometimes behave strangely (actually they usually work fine for Windows Forms, but ASP.NET designers are terrible)

• Ability to extend?

  I didn't try to actually extend the controls (I mean by inheritance), but there are plenty of events you can handle that will allow you to customize almost anything

So, on the whole it's a pretty good suite, although the learning curve is a bit steep at first...

Answer 3

I've been using DevExpress suite for a few years. I used WinForms controls, reporting and charting suites. Also XPO - their ORM like product and CodeRush - superb VS productivity addin. I get paid license, but I can share my experience regrding controls.

As other said, they have quite steep learning curve. Things get better with every new release, but still. The good news - their suite is quite consistent. If you learn how to use some feature in one control, you can easily adopt such knowledge while working with another control. Regarding stability: let's be honest - there are bugs. Sometimes really annoying. However, they get fixed pretty fast after being reported. DevExpress have quite decent user base, so third or fourth minor release has most quirks sorted out. I learned not to upgrade before fourth minor release comes. This way I can work with stable and reliable controls.

Extending their controls is not trivial task. They have some architecture which you need to get to know first. Some internal dependencies are not obvious for the first time you look at them. But it is doable. I personally extended their XtraGrid, XtraPivotGrid, XtraTreeList and few editors. First with help of their support and on-line knowledge base. Then, after few tries, I was able to implement my custom features pretty fast on my own.

Support is really cool. You can get your answer pretty fast if you know how to ask. Pretty fast means few hours if you are in the same time zone, next day if you work on the dark side of the moon. There is one "but" - I am not sure whether user of free suites is allowed to post questions to their support. I've seen few times when they posted answer, but asked "by the way" for license number when they couldn't recognize asking person. But this you should check. Maybe there is some kind of free license and those askers didn't even bother to get one for themselves.

There is user community located around their forum. Some controls get quite traffic, other don't. It depends. Anyway, when I'm looking for an answer, I go directly to their Support Center.

Wrapping up - I like their suite. It is actively developed and in my opinion worth every dollar spent.

Answer 4

Unfortunately, if you have zero budget to spend on controls and are making a WinForms application of any size you are likely in for a rough time. The money you would spend on the controls dwarfs the savings in terms of time (== money) spent wrestling with System.Windows.Forms.

Because of the difficulty in developing Windows Forms controls, I don't believe there are any free control sets out there worth using. That's also why Windows Forms control sets are so expensive.

Regarding DevExpress, I have used their tools extensively on my last project and would not hesitate to use them again. I did find that there was a learning curve, but that's because their controls will do just about anything you want them to do (and therefore have a lot of events and properties whatnot). I've also found DevExpress' documentation and support to be nothing short of outstanding. I was never able to stump their support people, and they pretty much gave me the correct answer to my question every time.

Is the project you're working on going to be a commercial product? Do you work for a non-profit institution? I'd try talking to DevExpress to see if you can work something out financially - maybe you can defer payment or negotiate a lower price.