I am looking for a reporting and database contols solution. This post is not a rate the control but what has your experience been when using it.
I had a look at Telerik, DevExpress, Syncfusion and a few others. I have downloaded a copy of each and tested each for a week or so. However these arent cheap when I make the investment I would like to base it on othera experience as well as my own feel for the tools.
I had read all the post on SO and many other sites. Many outdated so wanted to know more recent experiences.
DevExpress looks great and seems to be what im lookig for however from what ive read their controls are coded and very differet ways. WPF is apparently very bad. I could be wrong though and please correct if i habe been misinformed.
Everyone seem to be happy with Telerik.
I will probably be customising later on so source is important. Winforms will be used. But would like to migrate to WPF and/or ASP.Net later. This is client requirements.
thanks in advance
You should list down your expectations from a third party suit.
Also its better to compare individual components rather than the whole suit.
I have lot of experience with devexpress#winforms, but the learning curve is quite steep.
I don't like the layout controls. Rest of the controls are pretty slick. Reports and Charts are good.
Support is also quite good.
I'm working with DevExpress scheduler for WinForms right now, and I can say only praises for this component suite. Everything is accessible easily, customizations are very easy; but to be honest I still haven't done any major customization, so it could be possible that 95% cases are easy, but that 5% is impossible (not sure, don't have that much experience with DevExpress). I would just say that they are much better than Infragistics WinForms suite.
Also reporting suite (XtraReports) is well known as a very good solution.
Related
I cant decide between this two options.
M Project vs Sproutcore
I'm building an application that will be primary served on mobile but has to be viable on desktop.
Mproject is on the edge with number and variability of his prebuilded widgets and may happen that I will need some more or at least alter some behavior.
So this is kind of down side of Mproject. But it looked for first review that Mproject need less code for basic stuff.
And the second problem comes with the skins. I will basicaly need reskin everything a lot. The design of app has to be very unique.
So I want to know which of them is easily to reskin not just by theme-roller and similar stuff.
I would appreciate any other JavaScript-only frameworks recommendations.
Thanks for all replies.
I'm not sure what kind of application are you building so you should take care with my answer.
M-Project solved our problems fine, and help us to make it clear code ... when you understand how it works. It requires a bit of hard work, the documentation is a bit poor and is a new project where some things are not yet implemented. You can change application look modifying HTML and CSS so I think you should have no problems with this.
Also you can download their code and modify it without problems, it is easy to read and modify if you need any specific behavior.
On other side, I never used Sproutcore, it have a really nice look. But documentation say it is focused on desktop applications. Probably you will not have too much problems to adapt the output HTML for mobile devices, I guess.
Lastly, I think you can take a look on Lungo.js Framework.
Best regards.
We are currently an Infragistics NetAdvantage Select customer and have been for a few years. Their controls are ok but not what I would call great but the time invested in learning them to date is the main reason we stick with them. We use both ASP.NET and Winnform controls.
As we are due to renew, we are considering DevExpress as an option as they seem to offer much of the same functionality.
For anyone that has made this move fro mInfragistics to DevExpress, how have you found it? A step forward or back? Pros and Cons to doing so?
My company is using DevExpress and we are very satisfied with their suite. We have never used the Infragistics suite, so I can't talk about the process to switch from Infragistics to DevExpress.
Generally, I find the DevExpress controls very easy to use and implement in our applications. Some controls have a small learning curve like the DevExpress TreeList but it is not a huge issue.
One thing I dont like with some of their controls is the property "Properties". This property is used to set additional options to the control.
Per example to set the max length of a textedit (textbox of devexpress) :
textEdit.Properties.MaxLength instead of textEdit.MaxLength
So, their controls are great and have a great look but I think the main quality of DevExpress is their support. You can ask a question on the support page and you will receive a answer within one day, maybe two days if the question is complex.
So, if you are not statisfied with Infragistics, try DevExpress. You can download a trial version so you have nothing to lose.
I will second that you should give Telerik a look. Their support is top notch in the industry. They give you good real world examples and their documention I feel is second to none.
I took on a contract with a company entrenched in the controls you're considering and I wouldn't use them if they were free.
The reasons I make this statement is their documentation in my opinion was bad. When I spend money on a RAD type control suite, it's to make my work easier and faster to production. I found in some cases it was easier to just figure out how to make built-in controls do what you want versus trying to figure out the problems I was having with their controls.
Their samples are kind of like Microsoft samples used to be. They are fluff based for Tech sales to show at a seminar "how easy something is to setup" but in real world if you used the techniques and monitored viewstate and traffic their examples generated, you'd be less than impressed.
I didn't have an account to submit support tickets but I had 4 over the course of a month submitted through the account holder and to my knowledge didn't get an answer back on any of them. (That could have been a break down with the person I had to go through but I doubt it.)
When it comes to Telerik's, Rad controls for Ajax, very seldom I can't figure out what I need to do by either looking at the sample Visual Studio sample web solution that get's installed combined with their documentation.
Good luck in your search and even if you don't consider Telerik, I would strongly suggest you look for other options.
Slightly unrelated but you might also want to evaluate the Telerik controls. We have been using them for years. Exceptional controls and support. And their controls work with ASP.NET MVC as well.
Just a happy customer here.
Not related to controls, but with DevExpress suite you get superb VS addins for free - CodeRush and RefactorPro.
Like Francis, I haven't made the move from infragistics to devexpress, I started with devexpress. I can speak to the learning curve. Depending on the controls you're going to use, and how you intend to use them, there can be very little learning curve.
The data manipulation controls (xtragrid, xtrascheduler, xtracharts, etc.) are extremely easy to use when binding to a database. Less so when binding to persistent objects. Their XPO, oddly enough, isn't as easy/intuitive as it could or should be when databinding though also not incredibly hard.
The major benefit for me was documentation. Their documentation site as well as their tutorial videos are top notch and really get to the point without using trivial, nor overly-complex examples.
As Francis said, the response time on tickets, and the (usual) clarity and detail of the replies - they often include small projects showing what you're supposed to do, or will alter your project that you submit with a ticket - is second to none imo.
Moving from Infragistics to Devexpress is tough! I have been using Infragistics for past 2 years as a Windows and a Web developer and now I am using Devexpress at a different place.
It is slightly difficult for the developer to use the Devexpress control due to its versatile properties. If you take a example of grid in DevExpress (in case of Windows) there are 2 parts:
The main display part and
The view part so you can manage them during the binding
On the other hand there was no such thing in Infragistics, so it was plain and simple to use.
Similarly there are lot of such difference between Infragistics and Devexpress controls.
Now What I feel is if you are interested in having some complex functionality with lot of tedious logic then Devexpress is good for you! Or if you want to keep the things simple with decent functionality then Infragistics is good for you.
So as you know it is very difficult to tell which one of these is really superior - we have to choose them based on our own requirements.
Stick to Developers Express. They have much better upgrade path and almost all breaking changes are in written.
I have been using them since 2003 and still ahven't found a better match.
I migrated from Infragistics to DevExpress. Will never go back to Infragistics as their objects are much heavier and performance is not too great. Documentation is terrible and their examples are very juevenile. Infragistics data grid inline editing (Excel like) is a nice feature which is not available in DevExpress. Other than that, data grid, master, detail setup, data grid dropdown list declaration and other feature are much more streamlined in DevExpress.
I have been using Telerik RAD Controls since several years. I am very satisfied with the ASP.NET Ajax and WinForms controls. I have not used DevExpress or Infragistics controls before but I had a look at both when I took the decision to use Telerik.
This is probably too late, but as I found this post while asking the same question I thought I would add my comment with respect to Telerik. I have previously used Infragistics, which I found OK, but I thought the performance wasn't great. Recently I worked a contract with a company who were using Telerik for Winforms and what we discovered was that there were a number of bugs in their controls. There support was great and they were quick to respond to questions or comments, but unfortunately most of the time when we raised a question on why something wasn't working, the answer was that it was a bug in their control. also their documentation states explicitly that their controls are not intended to be inherited, so while building your own custom control off the top of their control seems to work in most cases, it isn't recommended.
We are developing an ASP.NET application. We retained an outside UI design firm, and for the most part have been very pleased with their work. Their "deliverable" to us was clickable screens -- Visual Studio solutions with ASPX files, images, master pages, etc. The screens were not connected to any data source. They had dummy data so that we could see how the UI worked.
One problem we've run into is that our developers are used to using Visual Studio design mode. The pages we receive from the UI firm have problems sometimes when we pull them up into design mode. The consultant's developers coded these screens without using design mode.
We assumed they'd be using design mode, but this wasn't specified in the contract. Was this too much to assume? Is there a lot of ASP.NET development work that never goes through VS design mode?
Third party edit:
Suggestion: people responding to this question should specify which
version of Visual Studio they're
using, as Microsoft trashed the code
base that was in the VS2005 and
earlier designers, and replaced it
with the one they purchased when they
purchased the Expression products. The
two are totally unrelated, and the new
one is far better. - John
Saunders
The more and more you work with Visual Studio, the less and less you rely on Design Mode. Complicated UIs tend to make the design view look atrocious.
I (and peers) never use Design Mode, for two reasons:
I learnt in VS 2003 not to touch Design Mode because your HTML was managled by VS. (Not anymore though since 2008, but once bitten ...)
It can take ages to render.
Much quicker to drag-drop from toolbox and hand-code.
I actually find that ASP.NET developers that do use the designer to be quite rare. The Visual Studio designer is notoriously bad at generating clean markup.
I never use design mode, probably because it used to mess my markup so much. Plus I do a lot of dynamic rendering, so there is no point. And I use exclusively CSS for formatting, I don't want VS messing around.
Many never use it, because of bad past experiences. I have found little trouble with Design mode in VS2008, when using modern controls, which are up to date and have good designer support.
On the other hand, because of the earlier problems, a lot of custom server controls do not have good designer support, so are much less useful in design mode now that the earlier designer code base has been replaced with a good one.
I almost never use design mode. It typically creates ugly HTML, and call me anal, but I really like to have clean HTML. If that means hand-coding it, so be it.
I prefer doing it manually, I like to have control.
If I want to look at the result, F5.
I almost never use design mode. For me, the biggest reason is because I learned web design/development in Notepad, so I was used to (and comfortable) working with code. Design mode makes me uncomfortable because I'm never sure exactly what decisions VS will make with regard to HTML, etc. Additionally, I can't imagine that a developer would learn nearly as much about ASP.NET and VB/C# using design mode.
The only time I use design mode is to automatically configure a GridView or something like that like.
Design Mode is taking quite a beating here, but let me point out that it is great for learning about new controls. When you are new to ASP.NET, or are using a new library of controls, Design Mode is a godsend for two reasons:
You can modify properties on the Property Editor and see them reflected immediately. This is particularly true for list-container type controls, where the entire layout may depend on one property. Running your application five times to see all five layouts is very tedious.
Controls with complex behavior (and lets face it, thats why you're using a control, right?) often have a lot of configuration built into their Smart Tags. Notice the little [>] arrow in the top right of the control? Click it. It'll probably help you out big time. This is particularly true for configuring DataSources, whose syntax is very meticulous.
When I was first learning to use Telerik controls, I relied heavily on the Smart Tags they provide, which are very robust and complete. From that, you can see what kind of ASPX markup is generated and learn to work outside of Design Mode. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy, so I much prefer this approach to looking at the documentation when using something for the first time.
I'm using VS2008, and I never use the design view. I find the code view to just be easier and more responsive than the designer.
Y'know, I never even realised I use the source screens 100% of the time. I usually develop in VS2005.
Whenever I do actually open the design mode, it's by accident, and I try and hit the source view before it renders. I've never been impressed with the design mode, and find it slow as well as adding a lot of unnecessary markup. I also find that intellisense and the properties window mean that I don't need a GUI to develop.
The design mode can also be a nightmare when you're trying to add any nested items. Because we've been developing for a customer using IE6 we've been using tables for formatting so we don't need different DIV definitions. Just clicking in an empty cell can be difficult, and resizing a column can take far too long.
For things like Template Fields in grids, I don't even know how I'd go about setting this up in design view!
Having said that, design mode every time for windows apps!
Design mode is getting better and I'd say that it's likely to become more prevalent as time goes on and the design mode tools continue to improve. I design all my components for design mode, but I still do the large majority of my code by hand - it allows greater control of code layout and doesn't end up creating an auto-formatted mess that I then have to dig through to figure out what changes need making. I know that in future my components are likely going to be used by developers that do most of their design by drag/drop and it's easier to cater for that now than have to come back and do it after the event.
Granted I'm doing MVC stuff, but I never use it - I "grew up" with PHP and code editors, and it still does me just fine.
I'm using two different versions of .NET (2003 & 2005). Some of the forms that were written in 2003 can no longer be edited in 2003 and the installation requires that they be maintained in 2003, so I use KEDIT to edit those forms.
Some of the forms in one application are too big for the .NET editor and I prefer a strong editor anyway.
I have no problem working in design mode. One exception is asp:Repeaters, which are not supported, or GridViews which tend to override my manual column definitions.
The other is if VS tries to do a full project scan if I rename a control, and then fails.
We primarily use the code view. The design mode is quite buggy we've found in VS 2008. XML controls tend to barf random character sets out for some reason, and VS will generally run slow whilst trying to render everything on screen. I mainly use the code-view.
Traditionally WYSIWYG designers produced poor code and render CSS and #INCLUDEd files poorly so they were of limited use, so developers tended to code by hand. In addition, these tools allowed you to go a certain distance without real knowledge of what you were doing, which was fine for web tutorials and personal homepages, but as soon as you wanted an extra degree of control you became unstuck - when meant you had to resort to looking 'under the hood' anyway.
Although tools have improved over time, many developers are so comfortable with hand-coding that they all but forget about the Design View - I certainly can't remember last time I used it. I'm sure there are a number of situations where such tools could be genuinely useful, but we are doing fine without and don't want to be bothered with figuring when & where such features can best be used.
Our UI is complicated and it is impossible for us to use design mode with VS2005.
The only time I have touched design mode is to do a quick and dirty prototype or an internal app.
How often do I not use design mode? 99% of the time.
I'm using visual studio 2005 and have been building asp.net applications. Mostly just departmental level apps for reporting and data maintenance. They work and they look ok but they don't look great. I don't have any other tools like Dreamweaver or Expression. Can anyone name any books or resources for making better looking web pages in Visual Studio.
Thanks,
Billy
Honestly, the IDE does a fairly good job at design work. We are transitioning our designers from Dreamweaver to Visual Studio 2008, and they definitely like the tools.
Don't take this the wrong way, but some people just can't make a page look good, no matter what tool it is. I am one of those people. I can code all day long, but if I need to put a page together, it is going to look like something right of of the 90's.
I'd recommend looking for some HTML templates, and adapting them to your product. There are open source templates out there, and ones that can be bought for relatively little money.
I always try to write the code myself rather than using design tools.
There is a lot that you can to do with CSS and HTML, and it's important to understand how those pieces fit together.
If your looking for some good examples of site design, I recommend checking out http://csszengarden.com
They have a lot of different designs that are all based off the same HTML file, so it gives you some great perspective into the possibilities of CSS.
My buddy Jacob Sanford has a book out you should look at:
Professional ASP.Net Design
First thing you need to do is learn CSS. You can't expect to style anything if you don't know the technology used to do it. I would start with the HTML-Dog tutorials, and go from there. More importantly is actually having a good sense of design, and that is much, much harder.
Design skills don't have anything to do with dreamweaver. To develop a good sense of design, you need to start getting introspective about the sites you visit. Think about why things look good or bad. Paired with your CSS knowledge, when you see something that looks cool, think about how you would implement it. If you dont know, the source code is right there so take some time to figure it out.
I have been doing this for about 5 years or so now, and I still suck at coming up with new designs. (although, I am better at it then when I started.) What I do when I start a site is rip off the basic design from somewhere else, and make it my own. For asp I use devexpress controls, which have alot of great looking themes, so usually I just end up extending the look and feel of the controls to the rest of the site.
Right now I'm not sure...
I'd say yes. I'm using it. I know for a fact that Universal are using it on some of their (thousands of) sites. I will add some caveats, however:
There are serious problems with setting it up, especially if you want to debug into the libraries.
The helper functions favour prototype, as opposed to the more modern jQuery. This is changing rapidly, however.
The documentation is a bit chaotic, again the Castle Team are working on that.
I'm not guaranteeing every last "out-there" feature works, but the point of the system is actually to keep it simple.
Compared to vanilla ASP.NET, it's an absolute joy. I assure you that you won't miss viewstate.
We have been building a fairly large application with it for the past year and a half. Its been nice not to have to deal with the old ASP/Page based model and use the better Model/View/Controller design pattern.
To get the new stuff you really need to work off the trunk of development because they don't do releases very often. We have a lot of tests that get the framework involved so when an update in the framework breaks something we depend on we know about it immediately.
If you have to work in .NET this beats the heck out of the alternatives.
There is an overview on the monorail forum: http://forum.castleproject.org/viewforum.php?f=6
I'm using it for an application and haven't had any big issues with it.
The biggest problem is indeed find good documentation and examples.
I've had no problems setting it up. Julian, I don't think it is constructive to say things like "serious problems" without any further clarification or example.
Debugging into the libraries is trivial. Because it's open source, you can debug into the whole thing.
I've been using MonoRail for production for ages on many projects, as an employee, as an indie contractor, and for non-work related sites.
I know I'm biased on that, however I can whole heartedly promise that my positive usage experience is what lured me into contributing to the project, not the other way around.