What are your experiences with NetAdvantage or DXperience?

Question

I'm looking into both of them, and while I have been quite pleased with NetAdvantage at my previous employer, I find the price point (plus testimonials like at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37921/what-is-the-best-winform-ui-component-set) to make me hesitate and consider DXExperience.

That said, I'm wondering:

• What your experiences are in field with either (or ideally both)?
• Would you be willing to spend your own hard earned money on either one?

This is for WinForms - and also a last question:

• Does DXperience have anything analogous to the UltraWinDataGrid? This grid is awesome -- and the absence of a reasonable competitor is a show stopper.

Note: This is not intended to incite a flame war, I am interested in experiences, and pragmatic advice.

Answer 1

The DevEx Grid is awesome, though I've got no experience with the UltraWinDataGrid.

Would I be willing to spend my own money on DevEx stuff? Yes, and I do - I've been using their stuff from way back in the Delphi days (maintained Delphi subscription for about 5 years, coming up 4 years for the .NET subscription now). They've got fabulous support and a very strong product line.

Edit: on the basis of what I've seen at the Infragistics site for their NetAdvantage WinGrid, the DevEx Grid can do all that and more. All the filtering, sorting, grouping and custom layout stuff you're probably used to, plus Card Layouts amd more. Plus, DevEx have a no-questions money-back guarantee if you're not happy with their stuff.

Honestly, I'm not a DevEx shill, just a really happy customer who - yes - pays his own money for their stuff :)

Answer 2

These are proving helpful as well: http://www.componentsource.com/products/dxperience-winforms/reviews.html

and

http://www.componentsource.com/products/netadvantage-net/reviews.html

But not decided yet...

Answer 3

I am an asp guy, and I used devexpress when I was contracting. Any suite has its own set of gotchas you have to learn, but overall I was pleased. My current employer uses telerik and I look back on my time with aspxperience as a bright time.

I did spend my own money on their stuff, and I think it was a good choice. Their grid alone seriously helped me get contracts.

Answer 4

I swing backwards and forwards hugely with NetAdvantage. The controls are good but over complicated - huge learning curve on a new control. They are also not very efficient and tend to generate large amounts of viewstate data and HTML; much more so than I feel is necessary. Their control set has evolved over the years and to be honest, I'd prefer them to start again - even though it would force me to rebuild big parts of my webapps.

Their quality control though is awful. Every new release is greeted more with fear than joy introducing new bugs as fast as old ones are fixed. For example, they've left a "debugging" statement in the JavaScript files.

I suspect their support has recently been outsourced and their standard response is "Please produce a standalone project to demonstrate the bug" which is tedious to say the least. It took three months waiting for a fix recently. I find myself raising far more support calls with Infragistics than all other companies put together.

Linked in with this, their documentation never seems to work for me. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough.

But despite all of the negatives, the controls are feature rich and can save time in rolling your own. How much time? Not so sure about that anymore.

Answer 5

We evaluated libraries from Syncfusion, Infragistics, ComponentOne, Xceed, Janus and DevExpress. We decided on DevExpress based on its feature set, grid performance and features and ribbon control features.

Comparing Infragistics and DevExpress Grid control I found that:

• DevExpress Grid is faster at loading, and handles more data, than the Infragistics grid.
  • 25K rows * 50 columns: Infragistics load time is 2000ms, DevExpress load time is 1400ms
  • 50K rows * 500 columns
    • Infragistics 600ms first load, 400ms subsequent
    • DevExpress 1000ms first load, 250ms subsequent load
  • 500K rows * 50 columns
    • Infragistsic 3500ms first load, 7000ms subsequent load
    • DevExpress 2000ms first load, 1700ms subsequent load
  • 2M rows * 10 columns
    
    • Infragistics Out of memory exception
    • DevExpress 8500ms first load, 10000ms subsequent load

The DevExpress DxGrid control for Windows Forms is fantastic. Inline editors make the UX very nice. The sorting and grouping is easy to use and understand for both the developer and end-user.

Overall I am extremely happy with the library. Their support is excellent. Over the life of this project, I have asked over 20 support questions and have received a good response each time.

I would spend my own money on the DevExpress controls.

Answer 6

We were wow'd by the Grid components of NetAdvantage too. It's been downhill from there, though. It seems like their technical support is "surprised" by the "complexity" we want to incorporate into the table (i.e. sorting, checkboxes, menus, etc.).

There solution has been to spend more money with them on their consulting services to fix their code. I'd rather chew my hand off before turning over any more money.

It is comforting to know, though, that we're not alone in our experience.

Answer 7

I've worked with both DevExpress and Infragistics and found DevExpress far, far better for several reasons. The controls perform better, seem more stable and the dependency files are much lighter weight for DevExpress. We actually made a project out of getting off of an older (.Net v1.5) solution that used Infragistcs because it was so difficult to maintain due to the required dependency installation.