Just got fed-up with NetAdvantage from Infragistics for its windows components. The UltraGrid is difficult to work with and requires additional coding to prevent unwanted columns from appearing at runtime. The UltraGrid designer user interface is terrible. Infragistics licensing costs are rather high.

Downloaded XtraGrid from Developers Express. (www.DevExpress.com). I've liked that company since my Delphi days. They have always turned out slick components that are fast, solid and obviously written very well.

The XtraGrid blows the UltraGrid away (in my opinion). The UI is so much friendlier and the component doesn't misbehave as does the UltraGrid. It looks like I'm going to switch.

Thought you might be interested.

Jeff

I only use the DevExpress stuff, the enhancements in the new version 3 are really nice. The beta of the new PivotGrid and TabbedMDI controls just came out today, and they are slick.

John

I'll second that.

I used DevExpress back in the Delphi days too and moved to Infragistsucks with .Net because the suite looked to have great protential. More the fool was I. I think the foot print is heavy and the screen redraws was very noticeable as well as the extra code needed as you have already pointed out.

I subscribed to the Windows suite of DevExpress a couple of months ago and I won't be moving away from them again. Their components are absolutely fantastic and I have not had any problems using them with LLBLGen Pro either.

Indeed an upgrade was released today and the MDITabbedComponent already mentioned is not new in concept but is very welcome to what I would consider is the most advanced tool kit for serious window form developers.

I can't say much about the new PivotGrid as they have somehow missed me from it's beta but a quick email to customer support will sort that.

If you really like the Grid (Wow, the grid! ) then you will absolutely love the suite, it's packed with functionality and you can create some amazing looking forms with it's skinning technology as well.

Yeah, $800 is a lot but it's only for the 1st year and then it drops to $300 but you are guaranteed to get the upcoming PivotGrid, Charts and Schedule components which is about $5 more than Infragistsucks. Oh yeah did I mention that there is also a VS2005 Beta 2 version to play around with too.

Peace!

Geoff.

davisg wrote:

Oh yeah did I mention that there is also a VS2005 Beta 2 version to play around with too.

In fact, it's the Beta2 version that I downloaded. Solid as hell. It's tough to walk away from the $750 investment in Infragistics, but you gotta do what you gotta do!

Jeff (the U.S. version of Geoff)

Hey thanks guys for posting this, as I haven't had quite as good experience with Janus as Frans has had and for winforms controls I was actually considering Infragistics. I will go back and check out DevExpress now.

Hi,

I have Janus winform and Infragistics suites.

For Grid control I use Janus winform GridEx, the best Grid control, lot of feature. I have not experience with Dev. Express.

Jim,

Yeah have a good play, the designers are the best I have seen and a multi-column tree control, well blew me away when I saw it. The Demos are brilliant especially for the grid and the editors. You can even print the grid with layout directly from the component to the printer!

It's not just the grid that is it's strengh though (Although it is very powerful, multiple nested views, card, vertical, you name it). There is about 20+ editors that you can use standalone on a form or in the grid so consistancy is throughout. Skinning as mentioned is brilliant and you don't need XP themes to add a very stylish look and feel. Suite also comes with a skinning editor if you wanted to make your own.

Good reporting components too, barcodes and labels are a breeze and you can give your customers the reporting editor too, a must IMHO. Also good exporting facilities, inc. PDF.

Although I am singing it's praises I can only do so with having used Infragistics for a couple of years, the only thing I would say for them is that it has ASP.NET components as part of the suite but it generates way too much HTML compared to the standard DataGrid so I stick to that.

When DevExpress releases the Chart, Pivot and Schedule components it will be way to hard for anybody to beat them on the WinForms. Wonder if they could convert the functionality of the WinForms components into WebForm, hmmm that would seriously kick ass.

Geoff.

So has anyone used DevExpress's web grid control? Looking for a good web grid. Comments would be appreciated. I currently use Infragistics but would rather look at something else.

Eric

For .NET 1.x DevExpress are defintly the best winforms controls vendor (other vendors are worth noting most notebly FlyGrid from 9rays.net and Xceed's UI suite). Still DevExpress have levereged their Delphi experience very will in .NET (although at times their object model seems too convoluted but they did make it more accessable in v3). The JCL winforms framework uses the DevExpress menus and Grid.

For .NET 2.0, Microsoft has done two things:- 1- They beefed up the old components and added alot of new ones that are actually functional. 2- All Ms controls derive from an extensable framework designed for both 3rd party vendors and programmers to facilitate extending any control (or even building a new one).

The added bonus of point (2) is that I don't have to wait for things like Right-To-Left support from a 3rd party vendor (because that support is build into all Ms controls). In addition, working with an extended Ms-Control will always feel more natural because of the abdunace of documentation and samples and the excellant design-time support.

This issue is driving me to decide that for VS2005 I should either abandon 3rd party vendors for Winforms UI controls or only buy those that extend the Ms-controls using the new control framework instead of having their own indepenedant framework.

Very interesting, Omar, thanks for the great info . Is this true for winforms AND webforms?

Is this true for winforms AND webforms?

I am trying to find answer for this from some of the guys at Microsoft. I will keep you updated

omar wrote:

For .NET 2.0, Microsoft has done two things:- 1- They beefed up the old components and added alot of new ones that are actually functional. 2- All Ms controls derive from an extensable framework designed for both 3rd party vendors and programmers to facilitate extending any control (or even building a new one).

The added bonus of point (2) is that I don't have to wait for things like Right-To-Left support from a 3rd party vendor (because that support is build into all Ms controls). In addition, working with an extended Ms-Control will always feel more natural because of the abdunace of documentation and samples and the excellant design-time support.

This issue is driving me to decide that for VS2005 I should either abandon 3rd party vendors for Winforms UI controls or only buy those that extend the Ms-controls using the new control framework instead of having their own indepenedant framework.

Interesting, but I'm not sure why I should care about that. Third-party companies have a long history of creating object models that are better than Microsoft's. Just because DevExpress (for example) can extend MS's framework, why would they want to? Expecially then they have developed a superior framework for their components. For me, if the third-party component set is more powerful than the stock components, is fast and solidly built, I'm not sure that I care about the innards.

Jeff

I tend to agree with Jeff on this, many of the new 'features' are things DevExpress and other companies introduced a long time ago, and in DevExpress case they make extensive use of interfaces so you can create your own custom 'views' in addition to the banded, card, etc views that they provide.

It's nice to see MS catch up some to the 3rd Party, but I would be dissapointed if they re-invited their controls to be MS compatible given the extensive resources put in to making them faster than MS etc.

John

Generally speaking the 3rd party vendors will always try to stay a leg up on MS, but of course every time MS gives away some more features for free, the potential market for the 3rd party vendors shrinks by a few programmers.

erichar11 wrote:

So has anyone used DevExpress's web grid control? Looking for a good web grid. Comments would be appreciated. I currently use Infragistics but would rather look at something else.

I'm using it. I found it to be the best of a bad bunch. It's very powerful and flexible although not the most intuitive thing to code. We ran into some problems with regard to doing eveything dynamically but were able to work through most of them with the help of DevExpress support. I think it's far better suited to just dropping on a form and setting some properties than trying to manipulate everything at runtime.

We looked at most other web grids so i think you'll be lucky to find a better one.

p.s. i'm also an old DevExpress devotee from my Delphi days, there seems to be a fair few of us here

netclectic wrote:

p.s. i'm also an old DevExpress devotee from my Delphi days, there seems to be a fair few of us here

I was a "Delphi-fanatic" with the best of them. But, as .Net approached, I watched as Borland made a series of really bone-headed decisions (Kylix? C# Builder??!?! ECO???!?!??). Now, Borland is all about pushing its Java solutions and this "Application Lifecycle (whatever that is).

I hated to leave them, but, in a very real way, I feel that it was Borland that left me.

Jeff

I was never a Delphi guy, Borland lost me long before it came around. I was a 100% Borland guy for a long time, then they got the itch to be 'different' in any way they could than MS.

Unfortunately they chose all the wrong things to be different, ActiveX object, Data Access objects etc. then came back 1-2 years later each time and orphaned their stuff to support the MS stuff.

They did the same things with Pascal libraries before that, where they would orphan whole libraries and you would have to rewrite substantial code fragments just to upgrade from version x to version y of the compiler.

Durring that age MS had it right, they evolved their libraries instead of orphaning them, I'm not saying AFC was better in any way cause it sucked, but at least the migration from one compiler to the next could be fairly well predicted; and when they did orphan they continued to support for at least 1 if not 2 versions of the compiler to give you time to migrate.

Borland had the greatest IDE and debuggers, and top notch performance, they just missed the boat for me in compatibility with 3rd party and even within themselves between versions.

John

jtgooding wrote:

Borland had the greatest IDE and debuggers, and top notch performance.

Amen to that...

I loved the way Delphi compiled into a single exe too, I wish MS offerred us the option of that too. Now that would be something.

Geoff.

I grew up on Borland tools. Had to give up on them about 1995 or so. A few years a later I had to take over an app in Delphi and finish it, and I saw many positive things in Delphi, but you almost have to pick one vendor or the other and stick with their tools, there is just so much to know.

Borland had a lot of firsts that MS later copied. I mean, it's a long list! People forget that.

I'm using the Infragistics suite(2005 vol 2) . Now maybe it's just ignorance, but I like their tools, especially the mdidock, toolbars, and the grid. Though the grid can be slow to respond under certain situations. Maybe I just don't know how good it can be.

Guess I'll check out some of the other grids.

VCL was actually pretty good, better than MFC's framework . I used borland's C++ compiler for a long time (during its 4.x versions) till VC++ was up to par.

Btw, Borland will come out with ECO II (or already has). Dunno if it will be any succesful though