I now have a lot more experience working with the Janus grid. As a good example of my experience with them, yesterday I found a bug setting the editability of the grid at runtime. Today they gave me a hotfix for it - which hotfix I had to apply to the officially released patch put out yesterday! The grid has a lot of functionality and looks good, but is also tempermental and buggy. I post support requests to the forum and the serious ones (such as in this case) seem to get answered pretty quickly, but when I bitch and moan about lesser stuff I am generally ignored.

Meanwhile, I found a friend has a coworker who swears by the Infragistics web controls. So now I'm starting to wonder if I made the right decision here. Although I'm past the trial period and I've forkced over my money

Buyers remorse seems like a fairly standard affair when it comes to buying a lot of these types of controls/libraries/tools. FWIW, we've used the ASP.NET version of the Infragistics grid and haven't been thoroughly impressed (to say it nicely). I think I remember Frans using the Infragistics stuff and finding relief when he switched to Janus.

I think you're going to find that a lot of these third party packages have their own set of problems. I've worked at places that refuse to buy any third party libraries because they can't afford to be stuck with something that only works 95% of the time and they have no way to guarantee that bugs will get fixed.

Personally, I think there's a happy medium somewhere (like LLBLGen Pro has been a great buy IMHO) and I've purchased other 3rd party dev tools that I've been very pleased with and others that I've felt like the money was wasted. All in all, I can't stress the importance of doing your homework (sometimes months of homework and several different packages) and even after your due diligence has been done, you may still end up disappointed. This is the nature of the beast. Win some, lose some.

Sorry, I don't think I provided a whole lot of useful content regarding your situation.

JimFoye wrote:

I now have a lot more experience working with the Janus grid. As a good example of my experience with them, yesterday I found a bug setting the editability of the grid at runtime. Today they gave me a hotfix for it - which hotfix I had to apply to the officially released patch put out yesterday! The grid has a lot of functionality and looks good, but is also tempermental and buggy. I post support requests to the forum and the serious ones (such as in this case) seem to get answered pretty quickly, but when I bitch and moan about lesser stuff I am generally ignored.

Meanwhile, I found a friend has a coworker who swears by the Infragistics web controls. So now I'm starting to wonder if I made the right decision here. Although I'm past the trial period and I've forkced over my money

No, it's good to hear feedback like that. It's just so hard to get my mind around the fact that given a choice between

a) the free suckfish .NET grid, which works 100% of the time, and

b) the slick Janus grid, which works 95% of the time

it's better to go with a)! Even though b) seems like the better choice, so much so that one is willing to pay extra for it. But I've been in this business long enough to know better.

BTW, the hotfix that Janus gave me today crashes. So of course they want me to send them the whole bloody project so they can debug it...

JimFoye wrote:

No, it's good to hear feedback like that. It's just so hard to get my mind around the fact that given a choice between

a) the free suckfish .NET grid, which works 100% of the time, and b) the slick Janus grid, which works 95% of the time

That's the crappyness with controls these days: the .NET vanilla crap IS crap, though what it can do, it does, and the 3rd party controls are 'somewhat' working in most cases, but it seems the developers working on these controls have too less time to finish the products as competition is so hard: almost all opt for MORE features instead of WORKING features.

BTW, the hotfix that Janus gave me today crashes. So of course they want me to send them the whole bloody project so they can debug it...

I'd refuse that. I ran into a bug in their grid as well, (winforms), they asked me to setup a project but it's very complex, and I could reproduce it with the demo install of llblgen pro so all they had to do was place a debug build of the grid assembly in the executable folder, and attach the debugger and see what happens. So I didn't write the project, I implemented a workaround and that's it. I've already lost at least 2 months of time in hte past 2 years solely due to 3rd party control crap that I'm completely fed up by ALL of them. Janus is pretty ok in that they really try to get things fixed, so they're better than the rest (for me).

Yeah you're right on, they need to focus on stability, which is not exactly a term that the marketing folks start drooling about!

Now they've agreed to just look at my aspx and code-behind file, as we know that if I don't set a certain property then the exception when rendering doesn't occur, so they're hoping they can spot the problem (which doesn't occur in their sample project).