What 3rd Party Controls are .Net Developers using [closed]

Question

I am re-evaluating my 3rd party controls. I currently use the Infragistics tools suite for ASP.Net and WinForms. What controls do you use and would you recommend them?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

I prefer DevExpress. Its components somehow seem more intuitive to me than Infragistic's.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

I have used Telerik, Syncfusion 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.

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

Peter Blum's Data Entry Suite

http://www.peterblum.com/DES/Home.aspx

Answer 8

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.

Answer 9

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!

Answer 10

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...

Answer 11

Infragistics Netadvantage

Answer 12

I second DevExpress - though they're not always the end-all solution.

Answer 13

In addition to the other answers, I'd like not to forget Intersoft's controls: Webgrid, WebCombo, WebDesktop and many more.

I use them (beside other vendor's controls) for many years. Especially the webgrid is very professional.

Answer 14

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.

Answer 15

Whatever you do, do not use ComponentArt....horrible tools, full of bugs, terrible support.

Answer 16

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.

Answer 17

To be honest Syncfusion are horrible controls, been using them for 2 years, because of the client. Horrible controls, horrible architecture and no documentation.

Answer 18

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.

Answer 19

Only used Infragistics' and Janus controls.

Infragistics is ok but not good.

I wish I wont ever have to use Janus again, one of the worst and not intuitive APIs. And I can crash the provided sample with a few clicks...

Answer 20

Telerik - RAD Editor, Tree and Graphs - nice apps

Answer 21

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.

Answer 22

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.

Answer 23

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.

Answer 24

from what I seen the intersoft grids seem to be quite slow