Component Suite

Y

yohaas

I am looking into purchasing a general componenet suite that will give
me Toolbars, Grids, Reporting, Printing and some other common
components. I know there are many suites out there and I wanted some
thoughts on which one to go with.

I have been looking at these so far:

Infragistics
http://www.infragistics.com/products/NetAdvantage/default.aspx

ComponentOne
http://www.componentone.com/product...3480&SubCategoryTypeID=0&TabMapID=11&TabID=16

Janus
http://www.janusys.com/controls/

Developer Express
http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/WFSubscription/


Any insight into these or other suites is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Yohaas
 
S

Smithers

If you are doing Web development - then stay away from Infragistics. Their
Web products are underdeveloped and poorly documented -- this coming from
someone (me) who has made honest attempts to implement their ASP.NET
products. For the Web - you should definitely consider ComponentArt's
controls. Now, having said all that, I'm a huge fan of infragistics Windows
Forms controls - definitely mature products.

-HTH
 
S

Samuel R. Neff

For Windows the Infragistics stuff is great. We bought it just for
the grid and use the whole collection extensively. They have lots of
goodies in there that aren't even listed in the marketing material
like an animation control (worst thing about them is bad website and
very bad documentation). The MDI manager and Toolbar manager are both
must-haves.

Can't comment on their web controls though--haven't had enough
exposure yet.

HTH,

Sam
 
R

Robert Fuchs

I use DevExpress for Windows Forms since 2002 and I like it.
Have a look at their newest version 3 of the XtraGrid Suite

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/XtraGrid

and you won't ever want to touch another one ;-)
Click to expand...

I forgot about the more important things:

Very fast and first-class support via Email and user community
news://news.devexpress.com
Excellent documentation: VS.NET Online Help, samples, tutorials,
Quick-Starts, ...

regards, Robert
 
Y

yohaas

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I should have mentioned that I am doing Windows programming, so I'm not
too worried about the web components. Right now I'm leaning towards
DevExpress, the lack of documentation for Infragistics (something I
have read over and over) is a big turnoff.

Anyone have experience with Janus? I can't seem to find too many
comments on them.


Thanks again,
Yohaas
 
S

Smithers

As you evaluate vendors, you might want to check out their free news groups
(if they have none, that is a big problem by itself). For fun, check out
Infragistics news groups. If you look at them for more than 3 seconds you'll
notice (1) there is a HUGE number of questions (I wonder why??? IMHO: poor
documentation, unintuitive object models - which is perhaps their biggest
problem, expensive tech support plans); and (2) a general lack of helpful
responses.

Sorry if this seems like a flame job against them - but I spent weeks to
actually implement. I was successful eventually - so I do know what it
takes. In hind site, now that I know what it actually takes, and then
switching to one of their competitors which had mature products that were
well documented and had intuitive object models, I'll never use Infragistics
again. Yes - it was for Web controls which I understand you are not yet
interested in - but the suite you are interested in is from the same
company... something worth considering if you value your time.

-Okay I'm Done! Good Luck.
 
S

stork

I don't like their web controls -at all-.

But their windows stuff looks good, I agree.
 
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