Most performant ASP.NET web controls suite

Question

Personally I've been working for years with Telerik's RadControls and DevExpress ASP.NET controls. IMHO they both produce quite an impressive HTML overhead on the client side thus for that I've never been highly pleased with them.

Of course I also know about Infragistics, ComponentOne, ComponentArt, etc. I'd assume they are not much different than those I mentioned.

Which (commercial) controls suite generates the most compact HTML on the client side?

I'm inclined to think there is no "most performant controls suite" rather a combination of server controls and Javascript based controls (eg. jQuery UI). Would you agree with that?

What combinations did you achieve the best/most performant user experience with?

Answer 1

Here we work with ComponentArt and we are really excited about it. It's really easy to implement, looks great and has a lot of functionality in it. Performance is also very good. We also use componentone controls but they aren't very good for web apps I think.

I would definately suggest to use ComponentArt

Answer 2

AlbumOnNet WebControl Suite

AlbumOnNet WebControl Suite is a set of ASP.NET WebControls enabling a Web designer or programmer to use RAD techniques to create great looking Image based Slide shows, Photo Albums, and Image based Ad Rotators.

The controls can be used for product image presentations, real estate photos, art gallery pictures and screenshots.

The controls are programmed to work at its best on the design surface (in the Form Designer) in Visual Studio. Drag and drop a control, like the SlideShow control, on the page, set a few properties and experiment with the Style attributes to match your page design.

WebControls included

Album WebControl SlideShow WebControl SlideShow InfoViewer (EXIF codes) Slide Info Labels Navigation Buttons Navigation ToolBars Numeric link navigation

Answer 3

Try Obout control suit. They are very effective and bring productivity with much low overheads.

http://www.obout.com/

Answer 4

You are correct in that commercial control suites tend to generate heavy markup and script overhead. This is partly due to the fact that they have traditionally had to deal with the ASP.NET postback and viewstate page workflow, which results in long-winded control Ids and a proliferation of many small javascript downloads (adding latency for each file).

Also, many controls tend to try to add too much functionality. They try to do it all but this makes doing anything simple with them quite a chore as there is a steep learning curve for a lot of these suites, as I am sure you are finding.

If you want to improve the download size and markup generated on your page, my advice would be to use a combination of ASP.NET MVC (great control over markup, no viewstate or _doPostBack scripts everywhere) and JQuery plugins, whic you touched on in your question.

Take a look at the markup of StacOverflow. It is written in MVC. Not sure what 3rd partycontrols they use.

The worst offender for hevy markup is often Grids. Take a look at the JQGrid http://trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.html