I was wondering if anyone has gone through a process of picking a 3rd party library for Silverlight components? The major offerings I know of thus far come from Telerik, ComponentOne, and Infragistics.
Rather than make this all negative can I phrase the question specifically as the following: a) Which 3rd party Silverlight components have you chosen to use? b) What were the key strong points that led you in that direction?
Unlike earlier incarnations, the current 3rd party control suites don't compete as much as you'd think. Its not like WinForms where every vendor had a masked edit and a Grid. Its much more on features this time. So I would say you can't pick a vendor, you must pick controls.
We have gone with Telerik. The control set is feature rich, and the performance is good (certainly better than their AJAX and ASP.NET versions from years ago).
However I'd note that it is worth paying the extra few quid for support. Their examples aren't always easy to follow and the documentation is awful. However the support teams are quick to respond when a formal ticket is raised, and the forums are also pretty good.
Telerik also have released a UI test studio recently, and my money says that they'll be releasing a SL version for this in the not too distant future.
HTH, Mark
Don't forget that you have some nice controls in the Silverlight Control Toolkit which are free and pretty good. I'd go with them if you don't need too many built in features.
From what I've seen, I'd probably go with Telerik as well if I had to have all those features.