CSLA and Infragistics - General Thoughts?

Tom_W posted on Thursday, April 30, 2009

Hi All

I ran into a small issue using the Infragistics WinGrid controls with CSLA and as we are quite heavily vested in using the Infragistics stuff and also planning to adopt CSLA for most of new projects I'm wondering what other peoples experiences of using these two together are.

Any thoughts, experiences, issues encountered and workarounds would be very gratefully received.

Many Thanks

Tom

whelzer replied on Thursday, April 30, 2009

Tom,

I've been following your other thread - we've had similar issues (ish)

We are using Infragistics for 3 big projects(all Winforms).  Personally I like the controls a lot.
Styling is great (so our users tell us). The grid is great, navigation bar is cool, etc.

We've used the grid a lot  - although I prefer not to allow direct editing (ie avoid your issue altogether).

So far we've used over half the controls - no real issues or concerns, the online support is ok (could be improved).
I like the local help and find myself going there first when I need to figure out a property, event etc.

Hope that helps...

Tom_W replied on Thursday, April 30, 2009

Hi both

Thanks very much for your thoughts and experiences, it's very reassuring to hear that we are not embarking on a suicide (inducing) mission!  Sounds like it's generally smooth sailing as far as the operation of the two systems together goes. 

We've used Infragistics as a supplier for a while, so I know what your saying with regards to their support regime!

Any one else with any thoughts please feel free to chime in (can never have too much reassurance!)

Cheers, Tom

ajj3085 replied on Thursday, April 30, 2009

Infragistics won't even bother looking at issues if you have other 3rd party code in the mix. That makes their support very difficult to deal with, because to prove it really is their code, you need to come up with your own pure .Net code to demonstrate the problem. Even then it takes FOREVER for them to actually get a fix available.

One issue I reported in Nov and it took six weeks before a hotfix was available. Fortunately that issue was not a show stopper for me.

Two other issues which were show stoppers for me (ie, to release I'd have to remove their controls) I reported end of Dec, and a hot fix was not available until Mid April (and at that time the 20091 versions were released too). Fortunately my release got pushed back quite a bit at the same time, so I didn't have to remove the controls before their fixes came out.

If I had to choose between Csla and their controls, I'd pick Csla. I think other vendors have been a bit more Csla friendly, but search the forum to be sure.

That said, when things DO work, they work well together, and that is the normal case. I've used their Win controls very extensively, followed by their Wpf controls (all of the issues above were relating to their Wpf controls). Their Asp.Net controls I haven't used in a while, but I also had a much more difficult time with them than Winforms controls. I suspect I'll be working with them again soon, since I have to go back to that Asp.Net project.

So, that's my two cents.

Tom_W replied on Thursday, April 30, 2009

Also, thanks to both of you for taking the time to go into detail, that helps a lot

JoeFallon1 replied on Thursday, April 30, 2009

I have a large web app and use Infragistics for Charts and Gauges. They work very nicely. I have the rest of their controls but have never implemented them in ASP.Net. The phone support for Charts and Gauges was excellent.

They broke their own code when upgrading from ver 7 to ver 8. When I pointed them to the exact issue it took over 4 months to get a hotfix. I had already worked around the issue but ...

Joe

Tom_W replied on Thursday, April 30, 2009

Thanks Joe.  hmmm, 4 months is not ideal as a response time!  I've used theMindFusion flowcharting controls extensively and when I've pointed out bugs to them they normally have a patch ready in about 2 days!

ajj3085 replied on Friday, May 01, 2009

Heh.. well I just submitted a report for WinForms. Should be interesting to see how long that takes. They already got back to me with a workaround... so I don't know if they'll fix it or not :-/