Which third-party WPF grid?

Question

We are looking at buying a third-party grid control for our new WPF application.

I would like for some of you to share your experiences with third party grids such as:

• Telerik
• Xcedd
• Infragistics
• DevExpress
• ComponentOne
• Others ??

The grid needs to work with the MVVM pattern and we need those functionalities:

• Inline Editing
• Sorting
• Grouping (optional)
• Theming

Support has also an important weight in our decision, so please share you stories.

So, in short, which one is the best?

P.S. I don't care about the cost (for now!)

Answer 1

I have had good experiences playing around with the Xceed grid. I have not used it extensively but I did like what I saw. They were also the first to produce a grid for WPF so it is one of the more mature products around.

Answer 2

Telerik and Infragistics both provide very good data grids, which work well with MVVM.

They are fairly comparable in terms of features and usage. The main difference is that Telerik's does most things out of the box, and if you don't want the feature, you have to explicitly disable it (ie: sorting and grouping is enabled for each column). Infragistics, on the other hand, has everything disabled, and you have to add it into the XAML if you want it enabled.

However, in terms of usage, features, and compatability with MVVM, these two were at the top of our list after a long evaluation.

Answer 3

i wasted many long hours of my life trying to get the xceed grid to do what we wanted, now i have been using the microsoft grid. the ms grids performance is not that good on large data sets, but it is easy to customise, the source code is all there, and its free.

we had issues with xceed when wanting to have objects in the cells and not just straight string properties. getting it in and out of edit mode was another issue, the ms grid was so refreshing after using it.

on the other hand the xceed forum and support was good, they generally replied pretty quickly, i think when we come to displaying large data sets we will look at some other products before going back to xceed

one of the issues with these grids is that they try to be all things to all people. which means the source code gets bigger, hundreds of properties emerge, the older the grid the more bloat, the more 'mature' products probably all suffer from this. i kind of wish these companies had specialised grids instead of one general solution.

Answer 4

I used the xceed grid in one project about a year ago (version 3.1). I needed the sub-grid functionality.

It was a one-time project which works fine. The major problems I had was:

• Localization was difficult. I never got copy/paste to work properly in my locale.
• Save/restore of settings is a nice feature but if you change something in the design you must not load previous settings because it can cause a crash.
• The final application experienced some crashes in the grid related to sorting. (I had a checkbox on each row. If the grid was sorted then the application would crash after 5-10 clicks on the checkboxes). . Removing the sort functionality solved the issue.

Remember that you only get 6-months of bug-fixes and no new functionality unless you buy the support agreement.

I think the free WPFToolkit is easier to use if you don't need the fancy functions of the commercial ones.

Answer 5

You can try Syncfusion Grid.