Infragistics Controls - are they stable/easy to learn?

Question

What is your opinion on Infragistics controls (both Web and Win)? Is this a stable library? What do you feel about the learning curve?

Answer 1

We've been using 5 years now and found that the controls were originally a bit buggy, and you had to keep on top of the hot fixes. However in the last few years they have become much more stable and I would recommend them, especially for developing in a RAD environment.

The controls are really nice looking and the grid is especially nice.

Since the 2006 they have been much more stable, and their AJAX based controls are great time savers. I particularly like the Web Dialog

AS far as support, there is quite an extensive online help section that includes video demos as well. The community has grown rapidly over the last few years, and you can always opt for the extra support package allowing you to get instant developer help online

Overall - Great time savers and they look great! But keep updated on the hot fixes :(

Answer 2

Hi,

In our development team we've been using Infragistics for 5 years. I would recommend them as they can vastly improve the look and feel of your UI which always help.

They can be more than a little annoying, so I would recommend getting the dedicated support. I've had most experience with NetAdvantage but get on their site and view the samples, that'll help.

Just realised I didn't answer your whole question, as far as i have found (mostly in house web apps) the tools have been stable and i've not had any issues as far as that is concerned.

As for picking it up, the learning curve can be quit steep but with the advent of their forum you can get more direct access to fellow infragistics users. You can also suggest new features and if they often fix your bugs in a timely fashion and will give you a hotfix if required.

Answer 3

The only part of the infragistic control set I've used is their charting and gauge components for .Net.

Although they look good, it was a PITA to use. The skinning tool frequently blows visual studio up (2008 on Vista with all updates applied). Also, the code required to dynamically generate one is horrendous. The main problem is that they tried to make a single control do way too many things so it requires a LOT of crap to get working right.

Answer 4

Hi

We have been using Infragistics controls for a few years now and I like the windows controls.

I like the documentation, for most controls it is fairly exstensive.

Answer 5

The problems we had with Infragistics web controls:

• documentation was not as good as we needed
• learning curve was steeper than anticipated
• support was not responsive enough for us

Aside from the issues above the controls themselves were good, fast and solid.

Answer 6

We have been using Infragistics for web apps for about a year now. I find the controls to be quite stable, once you figure out how to use them.

The learning curve is quite steep, primarily because their documentation is seriously lacking. There is a lot of documentation, forums, support, but the fact is that they don't seem to have a handle of how developers use their products. So you will find that some things that you believe should be a basic thing that most developers need to do does not exist in the documentation. Yet other things you would never use are there.

Their support is ok, once you get them to understand what you are trying to do. However, initially it could take a couple of days of back and forth until they get it. It is frustrating.

You will also find that it will be easier to use controls like the grids and basic controls than it is to use some of the more complex controls. I just finished a project where I had to use their WebScheduleInfo and Calendar controls. They allow you to create scheduling applications like the Outlook calendar. What a PITA! Since it seems less people use these controls, it was nearly impossible to get these controls to do anything custom.

The bottom line is that they are very useful, and when the project is done, you will be happy you used them. But do not expect RAD here. You will need time to work through the documentation and learn how they work.

Just my two cents...

Answer 7

we seriously had huge problems with their controls

• Help was not good at all and so vague.
• the controls felt so heavy and buggy.
• support was to slow.

now we have tried all of the big names Devexpress, Telerik, ComponentArt, Obout, ComponentOne.

and honestly Telerik is the best, i don't want to advertise for them, but their support, Fixes, improvements and documentation is top notch, plus they are so friendly and have huge resources.

now i suggest you try them all and use what fits your logic and needs.

hope this helps.

Answer 8

We are using UltraWinGrid, hosting it in WPF application. We had requirement for grid that will hold 300+ column, 3000+ rows, grouping in grid etc. Infragistics UltraWinGrid proved to be most stable and fastest. It was easy to customize it and extend it. We were hitting in "wall" here and there, but nothing you could not live without. Source code is available when you buy it.

Support was slow, but helpful. Forum can be helpful too, it is very active. They have option for premium support.

We still didn't use Chart controls, but what we have seen so far, there are a lot of features available on them.

Answer 9

I recently started using the WinGrid (version 8.2) in a C# WinForms app.

The learning curve is non-trivial but I did not find it to be too painful. They work "sort of" like the standard .Net controls (more so than the Xceed controls we used to use) but the Infragistics controls are so much more flexible they also become more complex.

I have found the issue with the documentation is that it can sometimes be hard to know what to search for (what they call the feature you want to use) and the documentation does not go in depth for every possible situation.

For me the best strategy to learn how to use a new feature was to try and search their online help then look at the intellisense looking for methods/properties that look like they do what I need to do. Another developer on my team uses a different approach, he basically searches the Infragistics user's forum to find the specific answer and if he can't find the question he will post it himself.

One thing we have noticed is that the wizard they provide in the designer will sometimes interact weirdly with settings you change programmatically. For that reason we have started to just modify they programmatically, which is also easier once you start learning what features you want to use. When first starting to use the controls it was helpful to use the designer wizard to play with the different possibilities.

I have not had a ton of experience with many other controls but I found this quite usable, and an easy way to add some really cool UI features.

Answer 10

We have been happy with the Infragistics controls for WinForms, under .NET 2.0 (later converted the project to .NET 3.5 SP1 with the same controls with zero issues). If you need fairly advanced tabular displays such as binding to multi-level (parent-child, or parent-child-child) displays (called bands) in a multiple-column list/grid (using UltraGrid), or binding multiple-column hierarchical data (using UltraTree), this control suite is an excellent choice. The functionality and flexibility offered by these controls is deep, but at the same time works at a high level - for example, with UltraTree, there is a function called BringIntoView() where, having selected an element in the tree, causes the control to automatically scroll to the selected element and make sure the element is visible. Being able to do something like that with a single line of code is very nice.

The tradeoff of the deep feature-set is occasional difficulty in discovery; it can sometimes be time-consuming to figure out how to perform a given simple task. I recall at one time wanting to by default select a single row of data in a grid instead of highlighting a single cell which is the default behavior. Neither Google nor the Infragistics forums or help (although they are often useful and overall level of documentation is good) provided an immediate answer and it took some digging to find the solution. Because of the multiple bands supported by the grid, the answer was not as simple as say setting a FullRowSelect property to true on the main grid as it may have been for a simpler control.

In a few cases data-binding does not work exactly as expected but we are able to work around the problems; it is possible these issues have been fixed with the latest set (we are still using the NetAdvantage year 2006 version). General stability of the controls has not been a problem at all.

Answer 11

We have used Infragistics for Win forms 2.0 for near 3 years. I love the look and feel but as many have noted the API is a bit of a struggle to find things at times. When I first started using them I paid for priority support and it was great, you call, navigate the menu for the specific control and you would get a developer on the phone who could answer almost any question off the top of his head. Also email you code examples on the fly. Sadly those days are over and support is manned by novices. So do not pay for priority support.

Answer 12

We're using the UltraWinToolbar and there's no way I'd recommend it to anybody.

Biggest problem seems to be the way it creates the tools in the code behind, it spews sequentially numbered controls out and seems to regenerate them every time you touch the design window. This means: 1) It's really slow 2) You can't work with the code by hand 3) You can't branch then merge your code

Added to which in my case the designer has ceased responding at which point the product becomes completely unusable.