We're looking to replace DataGridView in our Winforms app. What are the alternatives - commercial or otherwise - that we ought to evaluate?
+2
A:
Two options for you to consider:
- DevExpress: XtraGrid.
- Telerik: RadGridView.
Mark Byers
2010-03-22 14:42:41
+1
A:
You haven't specified your requirements but you could try wide spread Telerik and DevExpress.
Andrew Bezzub
2010-03-22 14:43:13
+3
A:
Replacing the Grid is usually not fun...
You could try:
- Telerik
- DevExpress
- Infragistics
- SyncFusion
- ComponentArt
But first - evaluate your needs, see why the GridView is not giving you the desired results & then do a through technical analysis on these commercial products before making any changes to your code.
Also as a side-note: don't directly use the vendor code & namespaces into your code, perhaps DI would be a better mechanism to abstract via a IGridView interface...
HTH.
Sunny
2010-03-22 15:01:37
I like the IGridView idea, but I'm not sure how practical it is, given that the row collections are typed the way they are.
Simon
2010-03-23 09:17:16
While the idea of abstracting your controls is well-intentioned, I think that's going to be more trouble than it's worth. There's nothing taboo about using vendor API's, especially in the UI (assuming your app is properly partitioned).
Adam Robinson
2010-03-23 13:20:11
I agree that abstracting vendor controls is a lot of pain. Just remember to partition your app really well to make sure that if a vendor control does not work out, you do have an option to switch out.
Sunny
2010-03-23 14:58:37
+2
A:
I would emphatically recommend DevExpress for a Winforms control suite, and emphatically recommend against using the Telerik suite.
I've had a lot of success with the DevExpress suite, and while their API is a bit complex, it's still quite manageable. And the controls are rock solid.
Telerik makes fantastic ASP.NET controls and utterly terrible Winforms controls. Telerik attempted to bring the WPF binding and appearance API into Winforms, which created massive complexity (as now you're dealing both with the Winforms and WPF API's) and unreliable behavior. While they have improved substantially in more recent versions (for instance, the MultiSelect property on the grid now finally allows you to select more than one row and the designers now don't cause a complete loss of all designer-generated code every time they're used), but there's still a long way to go before I could recommend them. I've just finished deploying a fairly simple (from a UI perspective) project that utilized the Telerik Winforms controls, and I can honestly say that we spent substantially more time chasing down bugs and inexplicable behavior in their controls than we did writing the rest of the application.
Adam Robinson
2010-03-23 13:18:37