What are the general thoughts on the 2008v1 release so far? We have just started to use it and don't really see much new or improved. Are there any massive improvements?
Right now we are tryign to decide to renew our subscription or move on to another suite such as Telerik.
The Infragisitcs controsl have been ok and we have usedthem for years but overall they are very heavy for web use and more complex than they need to be. Support and sample code is also weak in our view.
With all due respect to the requirements for maintaining complex software, I'd have to say that one of our primary observations about Infragistics products is that the steak has frequently fallen short of the sizzle. Our Senior Engineer with 25+ years of programming experience on the 80X processor family remarks frequently that Infragistics should spend about half the time they spend on their web presence and sales efforts on the development of the product. When our techs finally decipher the toolset, it's easy to achieve impressive results, but we often wonder whether we may have been able to do something similar in a comparable amount of time without the 3rd party tool. Under circumstances like this, payout begins only with the second or third project accomplished with the tool, and only then when it's done by the same technician.
Your observation that the 2008v1 product seems not to hold much substantial change over past releases is one that I've, personally, made with prior releases. The ever-present critique that it seems all-too-apparent that nobody on the design team ever revisits documentation with an eye toward continuous improvement seems so hackneyed that it now seems a foregone conclusion that mentioning it will do absolutely no good whatsoever.
Here's a workflow statistic: When we put new technicians to work with infragistics tools, IN EXCESS of 73% of their tool time is spent viewing the help documentation. By comparision, when we receive new MS releases (for instance our recent adoption of .NET 3.5 or VS2008) new technicians spend about 18% of their tool time in help systems. We're now several generations into the ASP.NET product line from Infragistics and still don't have context-sensitive help (or even easily-searchable help, for that matter.) This type of documentation is fine for in-house solutions where the majority of help documentation viewers are already familiar with API and technique, but it's woefully inadequate for efficient production use.
Infragistics pushes hard for developers to adopt annual subscriptions to their packages, but after our first experience with it, we quickly decided that it would be highly undesirable to pay far more than we pay for a tool like VS2008 Professional Edition for a toolset that lacks the polish and attention to detail that IG should be backpushing with every release. Someone at IG might invest some well-spent time reviewing how to detail existing offerings during a development cycle rather than adding new features with weak appeal and heavy potential for regression.
That's my .02 worth, this is our 5th year using IG products, and our second annual release purchase.
Jason LockridgeSr. ProgrammerSmithSystems, Inc.Los Angeles, CA
I have to agree that the learning curve for Infragistics controls can be fairly steep. I have been using IG controls for Win and WebForms for some years, and have a fair understanding of the controls I use. Learning any new controls can be somewhat daunting, and can consume large amounts of development time.
I also use controls from other supliers, and have found the experience to be fairly similar.
The easiest way a developer can learn a control is to see it in action. OK, I know IG has examples etc, but these tend to show many controls being used simultaneously and only cover perhaps a single aspect of the control a developer may be interested in.
A much better way would be to have many simple examples in a library. On release of a control, IG could produce a few examples of the control being used. Then when a developer runs into trouble trying to use the control, either IG or a forum contributer could provide a solution example. In this way a shared libary of simple examples could be quickly assembled, providing both old and new developers with an easier learning curve.
So, what about it IG ? Would you create a contributable library in these forums ?
Alex Samson
IT Consultant
Ambrose
Yes, all of these obvious things were pretty clear at the onset of this discussion.
That being said, an authoritative source for information about the controls is absolutely necessary. People "google" when they can't find help in a more obvious place, when they are looking for assistance in programming that they don't really want to have to think much about, or when they lack the technique necessary to get the darned thing to work as it seems it should intuitively.
The best answer here isn't, necessarily, going to be the cheapest or the one that requires the least effort on IG's part. Offloading support to the community will work in the short term, but it isn't a very sophisticated or polished approach. The best resources that lie outside the authoritative realm in documentation, in my observations, are those that take a very detailed, authoritative documentation, and decipher it for the general pouplation to digest.
The problem with much of the documentation that I've encountered from IG is that it's hard to get to where you need to be, and there's no authoritative location from which to discover answers. It's all piecemealed in various locations throughout the documentation. Want an example? Try to find a single example in exsiting 20081 documentation for binding webgrid to SQL 2000/2005/2008 data (or any SQL data for that matter.) You'll need to visit one topic to learn that you can't use designer datasources, another to see how hierarchical binding works, and another to learn that if your dataset contains tables with multiple relations (a usual condition) that you'll have to use the relation name, not the table name in the declarative code to create the binding.
This is one of hundreds of examples of why it's hard to use IG documentation.
-Jason
Jason et al,
I'm trying to direct this thread in a positive direction to come up with something that is both beneficial and actionable. If we don't do that, we're all wasting our time here.
You guys want better docs? Awesome news! We want you to have better docs both because it makes you happy and because it reduces our costs. There's no conspiracy going on here!
You can help us help you by using the feedback mechanisms to make specific suggestions (similar to the one regarding SQL data binding). General observations of difficulty certainly register on our customer pain meter, but they don't concretely help improve things. At this point, the customer pain meter has registered pretty high on docs, and we've noticed, and we've been and are acting on that. I don't think registering with that meter will help much more at this point.
What would help is if you avail yourselves of the "E-mail your feedback on this topic." feature at the bottom of every help page when you run into a dead end or can't find what you're after. That goes directly into the docs improvement efforts. You can also fill out the docs survey if you like; that helps us to focus our efforts in the spots you care about.
You guys want more samples? Good news! We are constantly building more samples and working to enhance the findability of our existing samples. If you have specific scenarios, please share. You can post them in the SDK & Samples forum if you like or use our Suggest Content form. We may already have one you didn't find; maybe someone else has one they can share, and at the very least, you're making us aware of your specific need.
What I'm suggesting here is that we further the collaboration to compliment these other help tools. If we self-organize through, say, thoughtful use of tagging, we'll build up a great knowledge base here to compliment what we're doing in our docs and samples. And heck, what we do here could well feed back into improving those mechanisms.
This is not any kind of cop out or "cheap solution" for us. It is just us trying to add yet another way for folks to get what they need. Until we get that Matrix mind interface that lets you and the software become one, we are always going to have opportunities to improve and expand on helping you to better use the all the power you have at your fingertips.
We want you to love Infragistics software. We have a lot of passionate, smart folks who take pride in working to make great software (and docs and samples). So it follows that we appreciate constructive suggestions to help us do that, and it follows that we take it seriously, indeed sometimes personally, when you're not happy. It sounds cheesy, maybe, but it is true. I'm cheesy like that.
Have a good day.
I think that you're sincere about wanting documentation to be better for all of the reasons that we've stated, restated, and stated again. I also fudamentally understand that this is a topic that you've heard again and again.
Think, for a moment, about your reaction to the constructive critique in this thread. Just go back and re-read your own words and the defensive tone. Also, reconsider the approach of expecting the customer to identify places where documentation is lacking. The very precept of expecting the customer to save IG the effort of a new eye on documentation by pointing out where the documentation is inadequate is more than should be expected of customers.
Customers have the reasonable right to expect that the most obvious applications of IG controls would have been anticipated, explained, and -- if necessary -- demonstrated by example.
If you still think we're wasting time here, I suppose we are.
Jason LockridgeSr. ProgrammerSmithSystems, Inc.Los Angeles
Hi Jason,
Do I expect you to tell us where to improve? I don't really have expectations one way or another. I'm hoping that you, our customers, will collaborate with us to improve the products you use on a daily basis. You guys are the ones who know best where you think we need to improve.
Infragistics is working hard to deliver you guys great software (and docs and samples). We have resources focused on these things, regardless of any specific feedback we get. We will continue our efforts to improve, regardless. The point I'm trying to make is that by providing specific feedback, you can actually have a hand in focusing our resources in the places you think we need to focus. You can have a hand in shaping the future of Infragistics products, if you want to.
We're offering feedback channels to you. It's up to you to take advantage of it. I see it as an opportunity for you, not a burden--the same way I see my participation in various feedback channels with Microsoft as an opportunity to help shape the software I use to build things on a daily basis. I have a vested interest in directing Microsoft. You, I would think, have a vested interest in directing Infragistics.
My responses to this thread have been in the vein of 1) empowering you guys to have maximum impact on IG products, 2) exploring how we can better help you through enhancing community resources, and 3) trying to help you guys understand where we're coming from, to maybe put a face on this company that you only see from afar.
The alternative would be my just ignoring the thread and letting it die, but I think it is better to engage you guys as much as possible. I apologize for coming across defensively; I did my best to keep it positive. We are indeed real human beings working here at Infragistics; I promise.
Now I suggest we all go out for a !
Fair enough. Before anything else, I'd like to say that I really do appreciate this direct interaction with customers. It's as close as we get to a mom & pop control shop in this detached internet world.
If I could set the takeaway notes for this thread, I think I'd include the following:
Jason, Ambrose, et al
It should be obvious from these exchanges that the IG documentation is somewhat lacking, and does not match the quality of the actual controls. I do not feel that taking a 'us and them' antagonistic stance is not helpful, so please take the comments below as suggestions and opinions.
I am still favouring a searchable code snippet library as a means by which some short term benefit can be gained to plug the obvious gap in the documentation.
I do also agree that IG needs to put more effort into their documentation.
I have been involved in many large scale projects, some dealing with critical software such as aircraft control systems. As part of the final acceptance testing of these systems, personnel (who had not been involved in the development) were brought into the project to undertake this testing. This methodology always produced quick results in defining flaws in both the software and any documentation. I do not know how IG assigns staff to the production of the documentation, but I could suggest that they use a new recruit (graduate level ?) who has little understanding of IG controls, and simply get them to produce real world code using the IG controls and the documentation. Every time they had to ask for assistance should demonstrate some flaw in the documentation, which should be recorded as a need to enhance the documentation. This internal feedback coupled to someone keeping a close eye on the code snippets being uploaded by users, could provide a quick path to improving the documentation.
Having said all that, it should be obvious that the existing structure of the documentation (especially with regard to developers) is in need of dramatic change. IG must realise that their competitors are producing documentation that is superior in terms of ease of use, and new customers may well make purchasing descisions based largely on this factor.
I hope that IG do undertake a documentation review, as I feel that many of their controls are superior to other vendors. But be aware that the competitors are snapping at you heels. I would also like to see a slimming down of future controls, as many of the existing IG controls now have so many properties that without good documentation, searching the maze to find the one you want can be daunting.
So, in summary, redesign and improve the documentation, enable a contributable and searchable code snippet library, and produce more simple controls (e.g. new breadcrumbs control). Undertaking these actions would in my opinion make IG the leading control supplier. Not doing so, the danger is that some competitor will overtake you and steal market share.