Are you kidding me lol... Telerik has nothing BUT problems, and what really makes me LMFAO is when you post something on Telerik forums you get the "FAMOUS" old Microsoft answer "We were unable to reproduce the problem must be on your end..." lol Telerik what a Joke...

NICE, Really looking forward to this so your challange is to replicate the outlook 2007 interface using ONLY infragistics controls. This as I mentioned before should include

1. Collapsable Splitter
2. Slidding Panes
3. New message alert
4. Navigation pane
5. Grid with similar filtering, grouping, Search Inbox combobox (typically top left of the email list view) and sorting features

The app obviously does not have to be a full blown application but it should demonstrate all the typical outlook features mentioned above as closley as possible and with ONLY IG CONTROLS. If you succeed then not only will I bow to your greatness in achieving what I considered not to be achievable but ill swallow my pride and admit that I may have been wrong with my assesment of IG.

 In case your up for another challenge, try to populate the grid with lets say 1 million records (up the anty eh). Enable all the grids features (grouping, paging and filtering) and get it all to work. If you can do this with the current grid (not aikido) then ill keep my big gob shut and hail the power that is Infragistics :)

 Very interesting

Very well :)
But before I get started I have a few questions:

A: Slidding Panes? Not sure what you mean on this one as I have O2007 open right now and the panes in the left navigation "dont" slide but
rather show/hide panels.

B: New Message Alert? You mean a pop up window (dialog)? as the Pop up Message that appears in the bottom right "new message notification" on a web page (like in weboutlook) is a security hack not a dhtml/javascript feature.

C: I have to do it with the current version of IG as I am not going to place old controls and ajax on my servers and/or laptop so that means 2008.1 of the infragistics controls... You ok with that?

D: You have to allow me asp.net controls as well (not 3rd party) but built in controls such as asp:label etc.

No problem on the rest, (and on your second challenge (not really a challenge) but will go ahead and add that as a tutorial to my website :)

btw you forgot preview pane, calendars, tasks and personal notes :) as I don't want to take advantage

Crumbs, your outlook app is looking promising already :( . Thats pretty impressive what you have done in such a small space of time. Just got the humble pie in today. Gonna store it in the fridge, now im just browsing through ebay looking for some knee pads.

This is going to be quite close, but I have a feeling you will stumble on the combobox search facility, alert window and sliding panes.

Infragistics team bow your heads in shame. Just look at what was achieved by one of your customers in less than 5 hours WITH YOUR CONTROLS. The guy is also going to provide a walkthrough on how he achieved this (and source code). This is increadibly valuable, especially for those who find your documentation hard to follow and would really like a good step by step implementation guide. I for one am impressed and think that this is the type of stuff your organisation should be churning out for its customers. His guide on how he implemented this inteface with your controls is exactly the type of content that I want to see on your community site.

Nice one Chris

@michael

I get the frustration with the webcombo (grid) and not going to argue that, "however" my plan for the dropdown in the outlook demo is not going to use the webcombo (for that matter didn't even cross my mind to use it) but rather was going to use the igmenu that way not only could I list submenus "like in outlook" "Recent Searches->Search Results" but at the same time have menu options... :)

@John, I cannot argue with you there and I am in the process of writing a tutorial for that (and a js file) just been caught up with some other stuff (sorry about that i will try and get it done this week sometime)...

Here is the deal folks no one control solves 100% of the problem not Telerik not Infragistics none of them do this has been the case forever and is not going to change so the best you can do is make your own and/or use several different controls together (hopefully in harmony) but this also depends a lot on how much money you got and/or how much talent you have... There is no doubt that all companies have short comings and a lot of times programmers (egos) <--myself included get so caught up in their "favorite" controls that they will shout at the top of their lungs arguing what you would shout at the top of your lungs defending... debate can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing I see the outlook thing as nothing more than another programmer telling me I can't do something nothing more nothing less... is it counter productive sure, is it fun? well for me it is because it was a challenge and I like challenges... and while I could go around screaming that IG has me by the short and curlies I can say the same thing about Telerik as the problem I was having with the window control was fixed in promethous but that means i gotta upgrade to fix what I would think of as a major bug... but tomatoes, tamatoes  

Here is a perfect example of this: Intersofts Desktop is great no doubt about it you can tell they put a lot of time and effort into it, however it "does not" do some things I need it to do so I am having to rebuild it (hence the desktop challenge)... Would I have prefered to just write a tutorial on how to hook it up "you bet your ***" but I can't do that because those features don't exist so now i have to rebuild their control from the ground up...

"On a side note (and not to start a argument) I haven't used Telerik's "new" promethous schedule so I don't know what it can or can't do and I am not sure what limitations you are running into as I haven't come across any limitations in the webschedule it is actualy (in my opinion) one of the easier controls to work with..."

One of the main issues we have is not being able to drag and drop between days. The Infragistics web scheduler only handles drag/drop in the same day. The Telerik component fixes this. There are lots of other minor things but I guess my main complaint is I have no idea whether or not this will ever be fixed. I'm supposed to wait like a kid for christmas and then open up my present to see what I got! I'd rather have a roadmap so I know where I'm going!

I think what Chris is doing is great for the community. It will help those struggling with the IG controls to have a look at a real world application and through the tutorial learn how to acheive it. This can only be a good thing and I think Chris should be commended for doing it. However am I convinced that IG is great? and am I ready to buy the kneepads? Not just yet. Just as other people have posted, there are still some underlying issues with the IG controls that have alienated a lot of customers. There is a one way trend of people leaving IG and moving to Telerik and apparantly NOT the other way round. The real issue here (and to be productive) is to establish why the trend is happening and why customers feel so let down by IG. We could argue back and forth that Telerik is better blah blah blah, but this is an IG forum and I for one hope that this discussion and others alike would shed some light on what customers want and what they feel is lacking.

@Chris

your Outlook demo so far is impressive and it has raised (just a little) my perception of IG. However the standard IG webcombo is a bloated dropdown with a grid attached to it. This is just one of the controls that IG have done wrong. Why do I say that, well try to replicate the Outlook 2007 webcombo properly. You will notice that the original contains a dropdown menu. To achieve something like this in Telerik is a breeze as pretty much all their controls have templatable items. This means I can easily integrate pretty much any control as a template. I may be wrong so please enlighten me if I am.

"I was amused for a while but now I am tired of your rant."

 no one's forcing you to read any of this! :)