Third party WPF controls: Devexpress vs Telerik [c

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

From my point of view DevExpress provides some what light weight controlls compare to Telerik. Reporting using DevExpress is more flexible. But at the same time Telerik having a better look and feel comapre to another tools.

Answer 2

DevExpress WPF is slow and not optimized performance wise. I've tried rich text edit control of both DevExpress and Telerik. Telerik control outperforms DevExpress in terms of performance.

Answer 3

I evaluated several WPF control packages, Telerik, devExpress, Xceed, SyncFusion, etc. We were primarily interested in a grid control that could handle a large amount of data and have good performance. In a simple test, we loaded 120,000 items into the grid and did a group on the fields.

DevExpress was the fasting loading compared to the others. It took 15 secs to load, while the others where all about 45 seconds. DV would group in 7 seconds, while the others took nearly 45 seconds. A couple of the other controls packages locked up! (fyi, the data was being loaded from Mongo).

When bringing up the filter dialog for a column on Telerik, it would extend beyond the bottom of the screen without any scrollbar. Also, cicking on a filter item in the dropdown combo would immediately do the filter then rather than waiting for me to select the others. Therefore, if selecting 5 items, it would take 5 times as long.

I wish DevExpress would have a checkbox dropdown filter option (like Excel). You can only select a single value, but it does have a very nice filter dialog that allows you to do more complex filters. Still, would like to be able to easily check a few values and move on quickly.

Telerik integrated nicely with Sql Server using Entity Framework. It's paging, sorting, filtering, etc. integrated directly with EF and had Sql Server do these operations at the database. Very nice! I monitored the sql commands as doing operations. It you are viewing large amounts of data on sql server, this may be the one control that really does this well. (Except for the dropdown filter combo that does not handle large data very well). We are using Mongo for our large data, so this did not apply to us. We did have a few exceptions with Telerik when testing data. DevExpress does not have a paging option unless you it yourself.

In the end we chose DV due to performance reasons with large data and stability.

Answer 4

I'd take telerik hands down...#1 reason being support, #2 reason is that if the control can't do what you need you just need to put in a ticket or post to the support forums and you can DRIVE their feature development.

...pretty cool :)

Answer 5

I would definitely go for DevExpress, their components are in my opinion nicer and with better APIs than Telerik ones, then let's don't forget you already know their object model, naming conventions and APIs from the windows forms world, this is not a minor thing because you will most likely reuse your know-how and this is far more important and valuable.

Answer 6

I used both telerik wpf radcontrols and the devexpress ! From my experience i was satisfied with telerik controls as my main objective was to be more productive and deliver a desktop application with a good UX in a short time ! Telerik make heavy use of the mvvm pattern and recommend using it as most of their demos are based on it ! As for documentation looking at the demos source code was enough for me to have a quick start ! On the other hand devexpress is more mature. in other words, telerik contains bugs but The support will always find a workaround for you if you ask.