ASP.NET AjaxToolKit vs other third party Ajax controls (Telerik, etc)

Question

We have a new developer who swears by Telerik controls and would like us to purchase licenses for the entire development team (8 devs) as he feels they speed up the development process. As half of the team is pretty new to ASP.NET, they're still learning what comes out of the box with Visual Studio 2008 and might be overwhelmed with a whole new set of controls.

Has anyone else here used Telerik or other third party controls? Does the productivity gained by using third party controls outweigh the cost of the controls?

Answer 1

Telerik Rad Controls are every bit as good as they are said to be. We use them in a number of projects.

As for the Ajax Tool Kit, sure its nice. But it doesn't even come close when compared to Telerik controls.

There is definitely a learning curve, but it looks like your team is already learning, so it won't be bad.

We have won some projects in the past because we knew how to use Telerik controls.

Answer 2

I've not had experience with Telerik but we had a very painful experience with Infragistics and I'd recommend that you exhaust all avenues before using their products, especially in a Web Application. To be specific, here are some issues we had:

1. Client side scripting caused issues since even simple grids are not rendered as html tables but rather javascript arrays of arrays. While they do offer a bloated client scripting library, it was sparsely documented and overkill most of the time.
2. Infragistics releases a new version of its product 3 times a year. In a development cycle that means you have to "update" in a pattern that is out of whack with your actual release cycle. In our case we worked on the project for much longer than 4 months.
3. Infragistics client libraries were thrown off by MasterPages. This should be fixed but I'm sure any time there's a new MS technology e.g. UpdatePanels/MVC, you have some additional complexity getting it to work with Infragistics (I assume most 3rd party libraries too)
4. Overkill. 3rd party tools are nice but often they are "one size fits all" which means if you've got a simple task (in our case it was a grid that users needed to "re-order") and you use one of these libraries, you're getting a rocket launcher where a simple rifle will do. All the unnecessary features just add complexity and pain - especially later on when you start having to do unanticipated things with the project.

Answer 3

I agree with Vaibhav, I've used a lot of third party control libraries over the years and the Telerik controls are by far my favourite. Their support is pretty damn good as well. The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is ok for simple stuff, but as soon as you want to do anything more sophisticated then you're going to have to write the feature yourself.

Perhaps you don't need to buy the controls for all of the team, just the guys who are working on projects who need them?

Also, Telerik controls appear to have an unlimited (fully functioning) trial period where the control periodically shows a trial license reminder. This means you can develop your app using trial components and if you're happy with the result build it with the paid for/licensed control. We did that before committing to buy, quite useful and the nags weren't that intrusive (about on in every 10-15 page views).

@David in Dakota - we used the infragistics controls just once and binned them. We found them really bloaty and generally not that great to use. We also tried the ComponentArt controls. Whilst they seemed ok to begin with, we found that their javascript caused all sorts of memory leaks, we got a fix eventually, but by that time our confidence in the controls was gone.

HTH

Answer 4

I completely support the recommendation to avoid Infragistics (unless what you need is exactly a copy of one of their demos). We had a lot of JavaScript issues and conflicts with the standard ASP.NET AJAX. Using it also involved a lot of digging into their documentation. I believe a good product should be mostly easy to use without 3 weeks of training. Another thing I didn't like is some features that were supported in JS only. There was (stated explicitly in the documentation) no way of controlling some features from the code/object model.

Answer 5

I too have used both Infragistics and Telerik's control suites. Of the two, Telerik is much better and their support and documentation is far superior to Infragistics.

Also, like Kev said, you probably don't need to buy 8 licenses. The trial mode functions fine and as long as you build with a release version somewhere along the line you should be in good shape.

The other nice thing about Telerik's controls is that you don't have to mess with any .lic files. Infragistics uses that and it was a pain in the butt. With Telerik, you pay for a version and get a non-trial install. No serial numbers, no keys, etc.

Answer 6

We've used the AjaxToolkit but it is somewhat limited compared to 3rd parties and we ended up writing a few things on our own. It depends on your project and what you really need. If just need simple things like menus, autocomplete, pop-ups, etc... I guess you can deal with it. If you need fully functional grids, docking, and editors you should probably consider a 3rd party.

Answer 7

@Justas Birgiolas: Interesting experience with Telerik -- our experience with Infragistics was similar. You'll find that EVERY tools provider believes that their stuff is good, and you must be doing it wrong. This is probably universal.

Because I had heard much bad about Infragistics I tried to convince our project leader that we should avoid it, and try Telerik, but he ignored me. He later regretted this. We eventually ripped all Infragistics-related code out of the project. Didn't replace it with Telerik, but wrote our own.

Answer 8

I've used the MVC controls (not the AJAX ones you write about) with very good results. You'll notice that there's a general trend of praise for Telerik everywhere you look and from what I've seen, it doesn't surprise me. Seeing how you've got fresh developers, I'd seriously consider giving Telerik a go.