Opinions on commercial MVC controls

Question

We are interested in the communities opinions on commercial MVC controls ie Telerik, Syncfusion. Which is fast, easy to use, stability, documentation, support and all that good stuff.

We are about to start our second MVC project and are currently doing research into improving functionality and speed of development to 'standard' MVC.

Any of your thoughts are much appreciated...

Answer 1

Hey,

Telerik is working fast to produce their MVC framework, and they are open source (you have to pay for support). I would highly recommend them. Next release is in July with 3 more controls. Check out a demo on demos.telerik.com.

Component art had a decent offering too; they had a nice set of controls in their first release.

HTH.

Answer 2

I evaluated a number of MVC controls for my company recently. I didn't go in to a lot of depth as I was looking for a fairly specific set of functionality.

I looked at offerings from the following companies ...

• Component Art
• SyncFusion
• DevExpress
• Telerik

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Component Art

Pros

• None!

Cons

• Slider Paging Style didn't work in Opera Mobile browser
• Very poor help, no code examples at all
• Didn't find it very easy to use
• Menu doesn't seem to support ActionLinks
• Forums inactive
• Not much on-line support
• None of the controls seem to render on Opera Mobile (error - "reparse document as HTML")
• Slow response from account manager when I activated an account
• Couldn't find a way of setting the page size for the grid in the view, it had to be done in the controller

---

SyncFusion

Pros

• Grid Renders nicely in Opera Mobile browser
• Ajax paging works in Chrome, IE, Opera Mobile, Firefox & Safari
• View customisation can be done in the view (to allow for different device specific views)
• Fast response from account manager when I activated an account with them
• Quick support turn around

Cons

• Cannot customise the pager in the grid control
• Scrolling grid doesn't render properly in IE8, Safari, Chrome or Mobile Opera (not even a scroll bar on the last one) - support issue raised (I think they've fixed it already!)

---

DevExpress

Pros

• Demo Code looks good
• Plenty of (complete) examples
• Fast accurate response from tech support
• Controls render well in all browsers

Cons

• None

---

Telerik

Pros

• Easy to use
• Familiar
• We already have a license for it
• Looks nice
• Themes will look similar to existing controls
• Renders well in Opera Mobile
• Ajax grid works well (and in Opera Mobile)
• Grid rendering looks exactly the same in all browsers (IE8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera Mobile)
• View customisation can be done in the view (to allow for different device specific views)
• on-line visual theme designer is available if we want to tailor our own

Cons

• Ajax activity image doesn't work in IE8, Chrome or Opera Mobile (but the grid still works regardless)

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I hope that helps you out. In the end I decided on Telerik, as we already had a support contract with them, and the controls (extensions) were native MVC. Also, they seem to have a richer selection of controls.