The only explanation i can come up with is that it's more profitable to cheaply hack together new controls and start selling them than to take the time to do things properly. I have worked with infragistics for years, i have been to your training, i have used and skinned almost all of your controls and im just plain frustrated with it all.
My frustrations boil down to three things:
To get a very basic idea of the bloat issue take a grid control, bind it with a basic data on an otherwise blank page and view the resulting page source and you'll see what i mean, check out the page weight / file size from html and in fact do it with any controls. There's so much convoluded, unneeded and downright dirty code its dissapointing. Things like tables repeatedly nested inside each cell. I realise that there are scenarios where this is the only option but why not remove the overheads when those features aren't being used?
Maybe with the increase in consumer internet bandwidth its been taken as free reign to not optimise and streamline. Maybe i get the worst end of the problems because i work with UI design and skinning controls.
I'm in a similar situation. However, I'm a first time user of the product.
After using NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, I have come to these conclusion.....
The product works, once you figure it out. I don't call myself an elite programmer, but I do know a lot. I also know how to read help files to get answers to questions about an API. However, the only help available for for these products (short of paying more for training) is difficult to follow. Some of the API references DON'T have examples. If they do, they only touch the basics and aren't well rounded. That leaves a programmer to themselves to figure things out most of the time. That can also explain the many unanswered questions in the Forums. Even the VB.NET help file from Microsoft has plenty of full and useful examples. WHAT'S SO HARD ABOUT WRITING A WALKTHROUGH TO COVER THE FINER DETAILS!?!?!
Tech support is slow. Not all companies that purchase third party tools can afford much more than the tools themselves. If they didn't need the tools, they obviously can afford to pay in-house programmers to write them instead. In hindsight, I would not have recommended Infragistics tools to the department manager for purchase. We work on time constrained projects here. We cannot afford to wait days for responses to tech support questions.
Tech support is inconclusive. At least by my experience. I've had a total of four help requests in. One is closed, only because I finally figured out the problem myself. It turned out to be a "potential" bug using dual monitors. I usually get "It worked for us" responses to my help requests, nothing more, even handing off some examples. Sometimes it's not easy sending examples because we are data intensive here. Lots of our applications connect to our databases. That's tough to mimic with 100% accuracy elsewhere. Instead, I try to be as descriptive as I can with the problem. If that's not enough to resolve our tech support issues, it falls on 'us', the customer, to have to pay for the man hours to create a basic, data sterile, example just to send off to tech support. To heck with me. I must have such a completely unique situation that it doesn't require any more effort to find out what can be causing my problem because it's not profitable to only serve the needs of one. I didn't write the Infragistics code. I cannot bring any more info to the troubleshooting circle on these issues. I gave the symptoms. Someone should at least start theorizing why, based on those symptoms, a problem like that can occur. Of course, I guess I have to do it myself, because my open tickets are "awaiting customer action".
In an effort to get regular updates out to customers, it appears many things get broken. One specific example, I upgraded to 7.3 from 7.2 and used the WebCombo for the first time. I can get a fancy dropdown upon first use. The page posts back (inside a WARP) and I get data based on the WebCombo selection. When I choose another item in the WebCombo, I can't scroll anymore. The scrollbar is there, but when I try to drag it, the dropdown closes and fails to register. I used the Upgrade tool to set my project to 7.2 (thus losing a 7.3 item I wanted to use) and the WebCombo worked as expected. Switching back to 7.3, it's now broken again. I'm reluctant to post a help request because history shows me it'll all be back on me with no resolution again.
So, as I stand with Infragistics stuff. Well, we paid for it already and we got our last free update. We'll drag through it as best as we can. Between myself and the other programmers here, we'll soon figure out what works and what doesn't. But we will most likely be on the lookout for other control vendors when we need to, unless some miracle of tech support manifests itself.
"Our biggest challenge is how do we change seven years of accumulated functionality without breaking all of our customers."
I appreciate the responses, i can see how you could get entrenched and hindsight is a wonderful thing but its not always that easy. Perhaps i was a little fired up when i wrote my initial response, the title got the attention i needed but the complaint is real enough as you've acknowledge. Its a bit like IE with its non-standards compliance, if they suddenly go strict and fix all the 'bugs' then suddenly 80% of the worlds website layouts break.
A colleague of mine recently did a fairly simple windows application with almost entirely Infragistics controls, i believe he used a dock manager for MDI style smart client, a few grids toolbars, combos, input fields and that sort of thing. The application weighed in as an 18mb install. That’s not including graphics, databases or anything like that, just Infragistics code. I could hear him swearing from across the room almost daily about bugs like the dock manager crashing and losing/destroying his panels and the GUI preview mode in Visual Studio would fail after a debug run and so the form had to be closed and reopened to continue work.
In terms of support issues like jsalzman's complaint, I’ve only had one request that i can remember, i had some trouble installing Infragistics 7.3 after a fresh vista reinstall and i provided all the information i could, the error message and scenario from the 7.3 installer was pretty clear cut. The response was about what i expected in timeframe usually 24 hours email reply but the suggestions didn’t solve the problem. I eventually found out on my own that i hadn't installed IIS6 compatibility in add/remove features. It seems like this would be a fairly common complaint since these features are not installed by default with vista.
While I’m at it i have to say that the style preset designs for your controls are astoundingly ugly, the ultra tab for example has no good looking presets the one I made for a recent project looks a thousand times better than maybe I should start a website selling Infragistics control skins. It’s disappointing because it seems like an area that could be dramatically improved quite quickly for some serious visible difference to the customers.
I have aikido installed, and we tried to use the splitter a few weeks ago and it ended up randomly crashing internet explorer so we had to remove it. I did check the payload of that control briefly and i remember it being rather large, which is strange because it’s just a table with a couple lines of JavaScript to resize two cells? I will check out the rest of aikido when I get some time.
Some of them like the masked inputs are great and i have no issue with and genuinely save us time so my rule of thumb right now for our development team is to use as few Infragistics controls we can get away with in order to strike a balance between speed and functionality and speed of development. Basically if someone else makes a lightweight suite that’s faster with comparable features and better documentation then we'll all be gone.
Jeffrey Vella said:I have aikido installed, and we tried to use the splitter a few weeks ago and it ended up randomly crashing internet explorer so we had to remove it. I did check the payload of that control briefly and i remember it being rather large, which is strange because it’s just a table with a couple lines of JavaScript to resize two cells? I will check out the rest of aikido when I get some time.
Jeffrey:
Just to comment on this particular point, since the CTP release we have done a significant amount of work on reducing the JavaScript footprint of the Aikido controls. I think I read that the CTP shipped with something like a 500K javascript size for the core client side framework, and at last check we had reduced that something like 90K so we are working really hard to get that down.
I am however very concerned about the IE crash that you experienced. Is this something that you are able to reproduce? Can you post or send some code where you were experiencing the issue?
Devin