I am re-evaluating my 3rd party controls. I currently use the Infragistic suite for ASP.Net and WinForms. What controls do you use and would you recommend them?
+5
A:
I could recommend Telerik for ASP.NET. They are very nice but would only use them for an Intranet application as they are mostly powerful but heavy. For WinForms DevComponents have a brilliant set of components.
Ilya Kochetov
2008-09-17 10:29:37
Yep dotnetbar is really cool.
chrissie1
2008-09-17 10:54:27
+11
A:
I prefer DevExpress. Its components somehow seem more intuitive to me than Infragistic's.
IMil
2008-09-17 10:32:54
We use them and they're OK... the biggest frustration with Infragistics is just finding the properties you need on their controls. They're customizable almost to a fault (and not always customizable in the way you think/hope)
STW
2010-01-15 18:05:08
+4
A:
DevExpress stuff, all the way. A great side-effect of grabbing one of the bigger DevEx subscriptions is that you get CodeRush and Refactor! thrown in, too :D
The DevEx grid, in particular, is second-to-none.
moobaa
2008-09-17 10:41:57
+2
A:
I have used Telerik, Suncfusion and Infragistics third party controls and I would rate them in that order.
Telerik controls are an order of magnitude more pleasant to work with than Infragistics.
My $0.02.
IainMH
2008-09-17 10:45:38
A:
We chose Syncfusion mainly because of it's almost complete handling of RightToLeft - they still have some bugs here and there, but they are very attentive to questions, bugs and feature requests.
Tomer Pintel
2008-09-17 10:59:08
+2
A:
I've used DevExpress for WinForms applications, mainly for the XtraGrid.
However the rich functionality comes at a cost:
your development team has to learn and embrace the sometimes complex design.
some things just don't work properly, and you need horrible hacks to work around limitations. Fortunately DevExpress support is usually very responsive in providing solutions and workarounds.
some things don't work at all - e.g. the XtraGrid does not properly support saving data from a grid row-by-row.
the licensing is quite limiting: to install a licensed copy on a development machine requires a connection to DevExpress's server; I don't know what will happen if DevExpress ever go the way of Lehman brothers. In mitigation, a source code license is reasonably priced.
Broadly speaking I'm happy with the choice. But I would want to do an in-depth evaluation of the competition (e.g. Infragistics) before making a recommendation.
Joe
2008-09-17 11:08:46
Hi, can you share your experience about peterblum data entry suite here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1355376/do-you-use-any-3rd-party-data-entry-controls
Barbaros Alp
2009-08-31 01:01:55
+1. I don't think of the Peter Blum suite as direct competition to Telerik and some of these others. The controls aren't as pretty out of the box, for one. But the one thing that I think sets it apart is its awesome support for complex validation and field state controllers. And that's the real reason I use it.
Steve Wortham
2009-10-19 20:57:32
+1
A:
Only used infragistic and janus control.
Infragistic is ok but not good.
I wish I wont ever have to use janus again, one of the worst and unintuitive API. And I can make crash the provided sample with a few click...
pmlarocque
2008-09-17 14:15:16
+2
A:
I've only used infragistic, but wouldn't really recommend it. It often seems complicated for the sake of complication, not to mention the fact that I've seen multiple bugs in it. Also, in web-land, it isn't very cross browser compliant. A lot of App Stylist things don't translate over to Firefox well, and the WebCombo blows up horribly in the new Google Chrome/Chromium browser.
CodeRot
2008-09-17 14:40:19
+6
A:
Telerik is fairly prolific and easy to use on the asp.net side. Although you will find yourself hacking some functionality in and out of them and then having a code change everytime an update breaks your hacks.. regardless they are still easier than re-inventing the wheel.
Quintin Robinson
2008-09-17 14:45:39
+1
A:
DevExpress for both Windows Forms and ASP.net. There is a learning curve, but once you understand the way things work, there is very little that you can't do. The Scheduler was the best on the market when we used it several years ago. The grid and charting has blown clients away. Their support is very responsive a usually on point. When you are trying to do sonething that the controls are not capable of doing, you will often see that feature added in a future release.
Bottom line: Great stuff!
Mike
2008-09-22 17:09:07
+2
A:
I have done only Winforms and have used Infragistics, devexpress and januscontrols so far.
I can suggest you to use devexpress.
Fastest in runtime execution, good community, good online support
Infragistics are very heavy controls, lots of properties, difficult to use
And support forum, knowledgebase and their homepage-member-area are VERY horrible.
januscontrols are lightweight and easy to use, but not so powerful as the others.
runtime execution not so good like devexpress
From my blog
Comparison of these controls, with details...
Peter Gfader
2008-11-13 06:11:55
A:
The client I'm working now is also using the SyncFusion Essential Suite. We've mostly used the Excel and Word IO libraries, of which I'm prettuy satisfied. They also provide a number of ASP.NET Ajax controls, among which a very extensive DataGrid. This offers quite a lot of features but unfortunately doesn's perform that well. All in all, the pricing is a little bit cheaper than the Telerik components, that's why the client decided for it in the end.
Ruben Steins
2009-02-26 14:15:11
+1
A:
DevExpress gets my vote as well my and my development team have been using the Enterprise package for the past 3 years and it's met our expectations. One thing we love about DevExpress is that they have EXCELLENT support and constantly updating their suite.
Coda
2009-03-28 05:05:24
A:
Whatever you do, do not use ComponentArt....horrible tools, full of bugs, terrible support.
tbone
2009-06-03 19:35:31
A:
Telerik, DevExpress, Peter Blum Validation Controls are all good. Although we are moving away from using Server controls for things that can be done solely on the client side and starting to use jQuery as much as possible.
Jeffrey Hines
2009-06-03 19:38:42
A:
We have used ComponentArt extensively in one of our projects for years now. They are useful up to a point, as every now and then, there will be a requirement, that is just not possible to implement using the existing API.
Having used Infragistics as well in another project and now working on one that uses Telerik, I can tell you one thing: Spend some extra money and buy a control suite with the full source code. Sooner or later, you will come across a limitation, and having the source code with you will be a great help.
Of course, changing the source code has the downside of it becoming obsolete when a new version arrives, but it is still better then requesting a feature from the control suite vendor and then hoping that it will be part of the next release.
Faraz
2010-01-15 18:01:27
A:
To be honest Syncfusion are horrible controls, been using them for 2 years, because of the client. Horrible controls, horrible architecture and no documentation.
Daryl
2010-03-28 21:39:22
A:
I'm using Xceed's DataGrid and quite a few different components from DevComponents.
Also, Xceed has a phenomenal set of Documentation and Code Samples.
Patrick K
2010-07-19 21:02:24