Discuss on Commercial Component libraries of silverlight

Question

I am now looking forward to buy a component library of silverlight for increase the productivity. I find there are number of them. Telerik ComponentOne ComponentArt Infragistics Syncfusion

I found more people talk about Telerik and ComponentOne on the Net, and so I did a try. Telerik seems more handy for the beginner lever, as many components are fullset, most of item and drug and drop to the xaml. But seems Telerik component is not flexible, eg, the uploader, they dont provide client side preview using isolatedStorage. And I more thing I worry about is the speed of Telerik, I got bad experience when using Telerik ASP.NET AJAX component, When the number of controls need to AJAXify, everything go okay, but when the control size growing, it is terrible slow and use up the CPU resource when update...

About ComponentOne, It seems that it is more fit for developer as its flexibility, but it involve more coding, reasonable coding effort ... But still the old question, performance issue.

Anyone can share your using experience and comment, thanks~

Answer 1

You should also try the Silverlight Toolkit - it's free.

Answer 2

The Silverlight components for Telerik are far faster than the ASP.NET versions. You are correct there - the ASP.NET versions are bloated "one-size-fits-all" controls that can really slow an application when implemented quickly. The SL components do not suffer the same performance problems due to the underlying programming model (particularly no javaScript!!)

I would recommend Telerik - with one caveat - fork out a few extra dollars for the support contract. Their control documentation has historically been really poor, but the customer support is EXCELLENT. Open a support ticker with a repro of an issue and they'll usually send you back a fixed version (or work-around) within a day or so.

I've also looked at ComponentOne, Infragistics and ComponentArt suites. They all seem to have the same "usual suspects" as conrtrols, so there has never been any realy reason to switch over to them.

HTH,
Mark

NOTE: Try also the Telerik ASP.NET MVC Demo - those controls really fly!!)