Janus vs Infragistics

[Ted Theodoropoulos]

i have been given the task of choosing a third party control suite for
our development team. most of our future development will take place
in the winforms environment. Janus and Infragistics seem to be the
leaders in the marketplace for grid and UI components. i've heard
that the Janus GridEX is superior to Infragistics' grid but the
Infragistics UI controls are superior.

i was wondering if anyone who has experience with these tools can
provide some feedback on which control suite would be best for the
winforms environment. i've downloaded the Janus trial suite and spent
some time with it but i'm hoping to avoid spending time with the
Infragistics grid and just gather feedback from others.

it seems like the Infragistics NetAdvantage suite gives u a lot more
for the money but i still have people saying that Janus is a better
package. comments?

TIA,

Ted
Post a

 

[Ron Allen]

Ted,
I like the Infragistics suite but then I haven't used the Janus
components. I've been able to make the Wingrid do everything I need and
I've deployed about 7 different applications with it. 1 to a customer who
was happy with the results and the rest internally (our billing system and
document management system(s)).
The Infragistics grids must be bound to a datasource so if you are
looking for unbound modes look elsewhere. Any small things I've needed like
this I've just created a small DataTable with the appropriate data and bound
that.
I like the fact that the other editor controls are easily bound to grid
columns. And, for the current release, you can have differing ValueLists
for a column for different rows of the grid.
If you decide to get the Infragistics suite I'd reccomend getting a
subscription as that will keep you up-to-date for a year.

Ron Allen

 

[Ted Theodoropoulos]

thanks for the feedback Ron! well the infragistic suite ($995) with
the subscription is over twice the cost of the Janus license (~$450)
so that will prob be the deciding factor right there. not being able
to populate the grid directly sounds kind of lame too but i guess it's
not that big of a deal to populate a dataset and bind it to the grid.

one thing that does appeal to me about the infragistics grid is that
it exports to Excel. the janus grid doesn't do that. sure, i could
write the code to do it myself but that could be a PITA with sub
datasheets. how about the UI elements of the Infragistics suite? i
hear they're pretty good.

 

[Ron Allen]

Ted,
I like them but I only use a few, UltraCombo, UltraMaskedEdit, UltraTree
mostly. You can do better than 995 for a subscription to Infragistics
through 3rd party vendors. See
http://www.xtras.net/products/infragisticsnetadvantage.asp for the one that
I normally use. You don't necessarily have to get the Enterprise
subscription so, if you can do without support incidents and source code,
the price would be $598. I think that it is well worth it in terms of items
you get for the price. I've subscribed for about 5 years now and found the
regular updates and additions to be very useful.

Ron Allen