what is the best control suite for winforms applications?

Question

i know devexpress have some more intuitive controls over infragistics, but what about component factory or telerik? What winforms controls would you recommend?

Answer 1

I've worked with Infragistics. It's not bad, has some nice features, but Telerik is better. I liked it very much. It's easy to use, has a lot of controls, has simple logic inside. So Infra vs Telerik 0:1 on my side.

Plus you cannot compare the support for it. Infra has terrible support and a terrible support site, while Telerik has a very nice support.

Answer 2

We recently used Janus Controls. It was quite good, nice extension points and a good look and feel. The other big name is Infragistics, although my use of them goes back to vb6 days when it was a bit clunky.

I did see someone make use of Kypton Toolkit, with nice results. I believe there was some good supporting documentation along with it.

Answer 3

A lot of financial real time applications recently written are using Syncfusion http://www.syncfusion.com/.

The main strength of this suite is its Grid control which come with a clean data model and allow a consequent number of updates per second with a reasonably low CPU usage (few thousands update per second).

I guess it's a niche market.

Answer 4

Krypton Toolkit is a free set of Windows Forms controls that are a good starting point. It includes full documentation along with samples in C#. Office 2007 styling and Windows Media Player styling are provided as well. However the Ribbon and Navigator are commerical add ons.

Disclosure: I am the author of the Krypton Toolkit.

Answer 5

I am using DevExpress controls. Their XtraGrid has cartwheels of functionality. I have implemented their ribbon and tabbed MDI. They work well, but since these controls merely replicate Office behaviour they are not terribly helpfull when you are making judgmement.

DevExpress controls seem to shine with CRUD tasks, if you have your objects set up right and you have a good domain model building interfaces that show lot of data with little effort is easy.

That is once you learn how to use these controls. That is I am afraid the hard part. The documentation is ok. There are samples, and their forums are reasonably lively. They do not have telephonic support in case you need something extra quick.

If you buy the whole package you also get Refactor and CodeRush. That was one of my key decision factors as well.

Answer 6

I've used DevExpress and Infragistics Grid controls.

Infragistics expects you to only use DataTables with their Grid controls. This is a huge negative if you need to work with domain objects, but a non-issue if you aren't.

DevExpress has more flexible Grid controls that can be easily used with Domain Objects. They have an interface something like Java's TableModel for the Java JTable control. Do not believe their claims that you can do owner draw stuff in their grid cells. It can be done, but the documentation is wrong and the tech help doesn't understand. I had to use Reflector and reflection on private fields and methods to do what I needed to do (shift cell data over and draw a red X when an error occurs.) That being said, if you aren't going to do owner draw stuff, then don't worry about it.

Both have sensible structures, documentation is what you'd expect -- fine for normal stuff, sub-par for weird stuff.

I would recommend wrapping their controls as a forward looking precaution and because the controls provided will only use 10% of the features provided. (Every project probably uses only 10%, but each probably use a different 10%.) It makes developers life way easier when they can quickly find the features they and all the other features are hidden.

Answer 7

I would recommend the VIBlend Windows Forms controls. We are currently using their Pivot Grid and several of their free .NET controls and we are quite happy with them. Here is a link: http://www.viblend.com/products/net/windows-forms/controls/gridview.aspx