.NET WPF UI Component Library

Question

Which library to use for WPF?

• Infragistics
• ComponentOne
• SyncFusions
• ActiProSoftware
• Telerik

Thanks,

Marco Parenzan

Answer 1

They all have advantages and disadvantages.

Personally, I've found Telerik and Infragistics seemed more like they were designed specifically with WPF in mind.

Syncfusion's offering is more of a port of their Windows Forms product, so the design is more like they're other product lines.

That being said, each product you listed is good - and each have their own feature set. There is no substitute for trying a demo and seeing how you like working with the products in question.

Answer 2

I'm a fan of Component One, mainly based on personal taste.

ActiProSoftware have some good controls, but I find that they don't expose enough properties to make it easy to style and customize, though you can get around this with implicit styles.

Xceed have my favourite Grid control, lots of cool features and easy to work with.

I don't particularly like Telerik and I've never tried SyncFusion.

I would love to try Infragistics as that is one that I haven't tried, but have been really impressed with the demos. Does anyone have any comments on the architecture of Infragistics?

Like Reed said, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but from my experiences I would recommend Component One.

HTH

Answer 3

@Reed - None of the Syncfusion WPF controls were ported from Windows Forms. With the grid control, most vendors use a simple ItemsControl based architecture. We have a much more elaborate infrastructure for highly optimized cell oriented rendering. This was implemented to achieve performance as close to Windows Forms performance as possible. The effort on our end to deliver this solution when contrasted with a pure ItemsControl based approach was at least 5x. We have a lot of customers using our Windows Forms controls in real-time scenarios and we wanted to give them the ability to move over to WPF without losing on the performance front. Our key controls offer excellent rendering performance even with millions of data points in direct contrast to solutions that are based on a simple ItemsControl based approach. Our controls often have a steeper adoption curve than others but in the long term we do believe that they are easier to maintain and update. Just my two cents:) Also, we are really keen to work with you on any issues that you are running into. Please let us know. My email is danielj(at)syncfusion.com.

@Tom - If you can send us feedback on the gauge we would greatly appreciate it. We are always looking for ways to improve and your feedback will be really useful.

Ultimately it depends on what you need. I think Syncfusion offers the widest and most actively deployed control suite on the WPF front. Disclaimer - I work for Syncfusion.

Answer 4

None of the above, just use WPF Toolkit for DataGrid and VisualStateManager. It is not that hard to style the controls in WPF/Blend, plus it makes YOU more proficient and your code leaner.

P.S. Though, you might still use third-party reporting, since there no built in support for reporting in WPF.