Third party WPF controls: Devexpress vs Telerik

Question

I would like to hear your opinion about the two control providers.

To put it in a nutshell: I am building a classic LOB desktop application. The app will be created entirely in WPF. PRISM 4.0 will be used heavily. Whenever possible, I will try to follow MVVM pattern(it would be nice if the selected controls were designed to adopt it easily).

Mainly I am interested in:

• Good data grid, which supports sorting, filtering, grouping, exporting, printing and works fine with a big amount of bound records(10k+)

  Combobox that supports filtering and auto-complete.

  Navigation bar

  Layout manager that is similar to the one that is used VS 2010

In a long term, I would also like to use their:

• Report tools

  "Data mining" controls

  Localization support in order to localize data grid actions for instance,..

I have been using Winforms Devxpress for a while and I was quite satisfied. Their support team is great. Still, I want to check if there is any better option on the market. In other words, I would like to know if Telerik's controls have any additional value?

Answer 1

We had to make a quite similiar decision a few months ago. We were using WinForms, the Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and DevExpress WinForms. For our new application, created new from scratch, we decided to use WPF (without PRISM) and we were especially in need of some grids, so we used DevExpress WPF Controls.

This was imho a good and a bad decision.

The good part:

• You can use the controls in a very similiar way you are used to. There are some differences, but you get used to them quickly. This is a huge plus, because it took us quite some time to get used to them while using the WinForm controls.

• The controls, especially the grids, are useable as the WinForms controls. If your users are used to them, the transition is very smooth.

• Applying one of the provided themes is very simple and you get a good looking solution without much annoyance. They apply to pure WPF controls, too, so the whole application looks consistent. We are still using mostly Windows XP, the themes apply to this as well, which is exceptional useful for us.

The bad part:

• We expected the DevExpress WPF controls to provide the same control coverage as the WinForm controls did. The DevExpress WPF controls at that time had version number 10.1, and we were disappointed that some controls were missing completely (for example TreeList, Schedulers, Passwordbox or the very useful LookUpEdit). While the later three are available with version 10.2, TreeLists still aren't there. If you are looking for additional controls from the WinForms package than the ones listed, it is a good idea to check if they exist for the DX WPF controls first.

• Some parts made the impression that they were done quickly. There were some quickfixes neccessary to get the controls running the way we intended to use them. The good thing is that most of these problems are solved with 10.2.

• The documentation and the support center for the WPF controls feels less complete than the WinForms documentation. While this is probably just my personal impression, I was almost always able to find an answer to a certain problem I had with the WinForms controls on the DX website, I'm not that succesful with the WPF controls. The support team is as helpful as always, though.

This list is not intended to be exhaustive, those were the things that immediately came to my mind.

So, what would I do if I had to do the same decision again? I would very likely use DevExpress again. Most negative things that bugged me were fixed with version 10.2, so the controls are quite usable now. I especially like that you can use your former experience with the WinForm controls (with limitations, of course). The later was also the primary reason for buying the DX components. Unfortunately, I don't know the Telerik controls enough to say anything about them, so if someone has experience with both, especially with switching from DX to Telerik that would surely be a very interesting information.

We're not using the MVVM pattern with our grids, as the "traditional" way of loading and displying data is sufficient enough for us. Some of our grids contain 100k+ values, the performance of the grid is imho always ok. The controls disn't look like they had a build in support for MVVM, if you're trying to use it it looks like you have to do everything manually. Maybe 10.2 changed things here, I haven't checked, but I don't think so.

We used our own implementation for localisation, so I don't know about the DX localization support.