BEFORE I buy an ASP.NET component suite Web.UI from http://www.componentart.com I am interested in anyone who might have experience of this product / company.

I know I can't expect the same level of support that I get from Frans but maybe someone has a story to tell about these guys before I buy...

And BTW Frans, their subscription licensing model where you pay every year for free upgrades and support is something that you should consider (for new customers of LLBLGen ONLY ) as I'm sure that one day sales of LLBLGen will plateau... and your insentive to continue to provide excellent support will need "boosting".

Marcus wrote:

And BTW Frans, their subscription licensing model where you pay every year for free upgrades and support is something that you should consider (for new customers of LLBLGen ONLY ) as I'm sure that one day sales of LLBLGen will plateau... and your insentive to continue to provide excellent support will need "boosting".

heh Thanks for the support

But, I personally can't do things to my customers I hate myself as a customer. I don't like annual subscription models, as support is part of the quality of the product.

Though it can't go on forever of course as in: you buy a license once and you get upgrades for free forever. That's also why the 2.0 version for .NET 2.0 will be a separate product (with a discount for current customers of course) though still not an annual subscription model nor a package where you have to pay for support (as some of the competition use: pay 3000$ for 1 year of support! )...

I have used their menu when it was aspnetmenu. Other than that I havent heard too much. If you are lookign at controls I would also take a look at telerik controls. That is what I use.

bert

Telerik controls are cool and functional, but I hate them as a company because they refuse to sell my company OEM versions of the controls, so my company has to embed extra cost into a product just to screw around with Teleriks licensing requirements.

They are much simpler and lightweight than Infragistics

Infragistics web controls are a bit bulky and buggy at times but their object model is very flexible and robust. Their support personell are idiots and their support site, samples, and KB are relatively useless. Here is my latest support nightmare with infragistics, their web tree has drag and drop events. There is client side java script that causes a server side event in the control to fire but sometimes the arguments being passed into the event handler cause a NullReferenceException. The tech asked me "Why would you want to do that anyway" and to produce a sample. So I made a very simplified sample (compared to the production code) that required 4 steps to setup, and the tech told me the sample was too complex and he didnt have time test the sample and asked me to re-do it.

Plus infragistics releases hotfixes way too often, 4 major releases a year is a lot to manage on the deployment side.

Devildog74 wrote:

Telerik controls are cool and functional, but I hate them as a company because they refuse to sell my company OEM versions of the controls, so my company has to embed extra cost into a product just to screw around with Teleriks licensing requirements.

They are much simpler and lightweight than Infragistics

Infragistics web controls are a bit bulky and buggy at times but their object model is very flexible and robust. Their support personell are idiots and their support site, samples, and KB are relatively useless. Here is my latest support nightmare with infragistics, their web tree has drag and drop events. There is client side java script that causes a server side event in the control to fire but sometimes the arguments being passed into the event handler cause a NullReferenceException. The tech asked me "Why would you want to do that anyway" and to produce a sample. So I made a very simplified sample (compared to the production code) that required 4 steps to setup, and the tech told me the sample was too complex and he didnt have time test the sample and asked me to re-do it.

Plus infragistics releases hotfixes way too often, 4 major releases a year is a lot to manage on the deployment side.

I would have to agree with your Infragistics comments. I use Infragistics because I won a subscription for NetAdvantage 2004, but looking back, I might have used something else if I had to buy it. I recently found the most rediculous bug in the webgrid and it took them almost a month to release a hotfix.

I've looked at both Infragistics (don't like them) and Telerik (which look abundant) but have decided to buy the CompenentArt suite...

I am looking for something that is fully cross broswer (including Apple Safari) and Telerik controls don't seem to render correctly even on my Firefox tests.

I know that CompenentArt still has some issues with Safari even with their new 2.1 release which is not due until Jan... but they are 98% there.

Will let you know if this turns out to be a BIG mistake...

Thanks for your comments.

Well, anything but infragistics (or componentOne).

The webgrid of infragistics is pretty bad. Not only doesn't it work with simple design time code (the vanilla .NET webgrid does which is really badly written so go figure), but once you bind a decent hierarchy of, say 100 entities in 3 bands to the grid, the html is so enormous (we're talking megabytes), this is not useful.

Also, because it's infragistics, they don't understand that if you want to add functionality but it breaks backwards compatibility, you can add it as an optional feature (for example their grids don't remember column definitions you set up if you bind an empty arraylist for example). This isn't provided because 'it would break backwards compatibility'...

Their subscription model is the only way you can get decent upgrades, because your current version will be out of date within a few months, leaving you with nothing but raw bugfixes, but the real pain points are often in design flaws which are fixed in 'future versions'.

DevilDog: whoa, that's one heck of a sad story... the example is too complex... in my book that sounds like 'I don't want to help you, shoot me'.

Markus: no webgrid is fully compatible with all browsers, at least I haven't run into one which is.

Happy new year all.

I've only worked with infragistics, and I have to say its a painful experience. I have hundreds of things I can moan about, but the main 2 are:

1. Why is the HTML the infragistics controls produce completely OTT (lots of it and for no benefit); and

2. I find their API next to useless. 9 times out of 10 you find a method that sounds like it does something you want, so you use it, and........surprise surprise it does NOTHING!

Frans, release a set of web UI controls!!

It's funny, years ago (I mean, like 10 years ago) I got a free set of Protoview controls because I was writing a review of grid controls for a magazine. I think Infragistics was a merger between Sheridan and Protoview, right? Don't know about Sheridan, but Protoview had some issues, to say the least. The president of the company came to my house to discuss the product, and the only thing that ever came out of his mouth was marketing-speak.

The article was never published. I thought all the grid controls on the market had too many problems and couldn't honestly recommend any of them.

Hey Marcus and others!

I saw you bought the componentart suite .. are you still happy with it or are there any caveats which you wished to have known before?

I have to make the same decision Telerik RAD or ComponentArt WinUI 2006 ???

Any suggestions from the community are highly welcome!

I own the componentart suite...

1. I purchased the subscription about a year ago and since they released the grid, calendar, and charting components (and some others). Which i essentially got for free. I was happy about this.

2. Some of the support personnel are duds, but it seems like if you go back and forth a few times and they can't address your problem then they will send you to some developers that can answer your questions.

3. Good and bad: they make alot of releases...yes they fix bugs but sometimes they release products too earlier and without sufficient documentation.

4. All the components are generally great, but they do wander a little bit from the standard asp.net component model.

5. I just renewed my subscription so they can't be too horrible

Bottom line is that i haven't seen anything better, the only other vendor i would look at is telerik....

BTW Stay away from DevExpress ASPxGrid... I had horrible experiences with it...The code bloat and rendering time was ridiculous.

lotek wrote:

I own the componentart suite...

The controls look pretty, indeed.

1. Some of the support personnel are duds, but it seems like if you go back and forth a few times and they can't address your problem then they will send you to some developers that can answer your questions.

Well, I have no experience with componentart's support desk, but in general, it's that support personell doesn't have to be part of the core dev-team on a given tool/application/component. So even though the support team member is perhaps skilled in using the tool, there's always a gap between the very tiny details known only by the very few people who worked on the code and the knowledge of the product as known by the supportteam member, that's unavoidable, unless a developer does the support as well.

A good support team though should recognize questions which deal with inner gory details and should pass them to the right person who knows the details.

1. Good and bad: they make alot of releases...yes they fix bugs but sometimes they release products too earlier and without sufficient documentation.

As their competitors do that too, I think they seem to find it necessary to get to market first with a product, also because their market is very competitive (as it seems). But it's also some sort of tradition: control vendor who releases a product which is buggy. I haven't come across a control vendor who didn't have a buggy product, but that's in a way OK, as long as the control vendor releases patches often (like Janus does) instead of sitting of fixes for a decade or so to release it in a much overdue service pack (infragistics, component1)

BTW Stay away from DevExpress ASPxGrid... I had horrible experiences with it...The code bloat and rendering time was ridiculous.

As an mvp I have a subscription to their stuff and I tried it out to see if it worked with the new llblgenprodatasource(2) controls in v2. I must say it worked OK. It was bloated and huge, admitted, but their ajax code was pretty seamless. What struck me though was that it completely lacked support for server-side paging! It can't delegate paging to a bound datasource control like the vanilla datagridview can do. IMHO a showstopper.

I'll throw in my two cents here and say that we purchased the ComponentArt 3.0 suite and really like the ASP.NET Menu. I've played with the TabStrip/PageView controls and throught that it was well done, but stopped using it when I found that the form validation wasn't specific to a tab. I'm now using Peter Blum's asp.net validation controls and this might solve my tab validation problem.

As for a good grid I have been using The Janus Systems Web GridEX and really like it a lot. I haven't found much that I needed that it didn't do. The only thing I'm starting to want more of is better ajax functionality.

We use both the current Component Art and Telerik control suites. Overall both are good products, but have their bugs. Your product will look great, but you will waste a lot of time on implementing work a rounds. And if you want a stable product you'll wait a few weeks after the first release.

A few comments:

• Teleriks library has more controls. And some great ones (upload, combo box, Editor, window, etc).
• Component Art seems to be a bit more Artsy and visual driven while Teleriks controls seem to handle functionality a bit better.
• Component Arts Client API's seem a bit more advanced, however they provide almost no documentation. A lot of trial and error is required.
• Component Arts controls render smaller foot prints then Telerik (about 15% - 20%)
• Teleriks controls are more in line with ASP.NET controls.
• Both companies support is average.
• Telerik has a public road map for future releases, Component Art doesn't (this drives me nuts).

All though the control suites overlap they seem to complement each other. For example:

1) Component Arts Grid is lightweight (about 50% smaller then Teleriks), but it doesn't handle advanced functionality (doesn't support the LLBLGen2 data source). So for read only pages I use Component Art and editing pages I use Telerik.

2) Component Arts Callback is smaller then Telerik, but Telerik allows more flexibility as far as the server side programming.

I've used Janus Systems Web GridEX with some success, the Devex grid did seem slow to me; though I love their winforms tools.

I'm using the Janus GridEx also. Actually, Jim and I work together and he's the one that introduced me to it.

I like it.

I've used the Infragistic's grid before and agree with everything said here about it and then some.

GridEx works very well, and once you get the hang of where everything is in the object model, it has some good design time support and in code the objects and methods are pretty much what they seem to be - again, once you figure out the object model. It's not that it's complex, but sometimes things aren't where you expect them.

They have some pretty good examples and their online support is good - I believe the developers themselves answer questions (as long as your example is clear) and they respond fairly quickly.

I had problems with every control rendering properly in Firefox and Netscape, including the grid. But with the addition of the browserCaps section to the web.config file, pieces for Firefox and Netscape, the problem goes away. There may be other entries for other browsers, but those are the only two I currently bother with.

Emmet wrote:

All though the control suites overlap they seem to complement each other. For example:

1) Component Arts Grid is lightweight (about 50% smaller then Teleriks), but it doesn't handle advanced functionality (doesn't support the LLBLGen2 data source). So for read only pages I use Component Art and editing pages I use Telerik.

What!?, they don't support LLBLGenProDataSource(2) components? how can they possibly not support these, they're derived from DataSourceControl, the .NET control class which is the base of all the datasourcecontrols out there... Only if they deliberately added custom code to only work with the vanilla datasource controls of asp.net, which is kind of stupid if you ask me.

Otis wrote:

What!?, they don't support LLBLGenProDataSource(2) components? how can they possibly not support these, they're derived from DataSourceControl, the .NET control class which is the base of all the datasourcecontrols out there... Only if they deliberately added custom code to only work with the vanilla datasource controls of asp.net, which is kind of stupid if you ask me.

Component Art has a history of not following .NET standards. Basically they throw an exception: "Data source control must be a SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource."

Looking at their DataBind method (a plus is they provide source). The just does a bunch of:

if (dataSource is SqlDataSource)
{ ... }
else if (dataSource is ObjectDataSource)
{ ... }
etc.

Sorry, but that's just sad....

I mean, everything they have to call is in the base classes. They never have to call any of the methods in the derived controls...

Emmet wrote:

if (dataSource is SqlDataSource)
{ ... }
else if (dataSource is ObjectDataSource)
{ ... }
etc.

Code like that makes me angry. Do they not understand what inheritance is for?

If you ask me thats a showstopper!

I will look into that Telerik Controls deeper...