Infragistic NetAdvantage 2005, any opinions?

[travisowens]

I've been having a hard time finding reviews (Amazon doesn't even seem to sell the package) about NetAdvantage 2005. I fully understand they're considered the best on the market for 3rd party controls and I have used 2004 in the past but I wanted some opinions on the 2005 package, especially when it comes to their ASP.Net controls and if anybody finds them slow at all.

 

The closest thing I've come across as a review was here but virtually all of them were for 2004

http://www.componentsource.com/catalog.asp?sc=EACTL&option=15777&fl=&RC=TSUMP&bc=&PO=512326&ul=en&vw=T17

[mike55]

We got NetAdvantage Vol.2, earlier in the year, we are using the datetextbox, webmenu and webtoolbar controls. Overall they do what they are suppose to do. So far so good, it would seem that the investment that we made was worth it.

 

Mike55.

[shaul_ahuva]

Yuck! :)

 

Seriously, it's an okay library that has two critical flaws (both with WebTextEdit - the base class that most, if not all, "text" controls inherit from):

 

1) Anything inheriting from WebTextEdit render 2 hidden elements and an input "text" element...three times the amount of HTML that I would normally expect...

2) I have yet to find a way to add attributes to the html elements output by the server controls. The HTML elements are created on the fly (they're not "child" controls), and nothing is done (what what I can see in the source) to ensure attributes are rendered.

 

If your pages contain a limited number of text-based controls, you should be okay. However, if your pages contain a lot (some of the pages I'm currently working on contain 100+ arranged in a grid) you could be looking at ~400K+ page sizes before viewstate if factored in.

[college_amy]

I agree with shaul... I have used the 2005 version and found it very buggy, NO support at all (they have a support forum, good luck getting any answers there), difficult to use 90% of their controls and try getting it to install correctly on a server.

 

geesh...

 

But I do have to say this, the things that DID actually work, were awesome. But it took days and weeks to figure it out. They don't offer a book or anything to help explain how to do things.. they do offer a training course that is expensive and I don't think all the headache is worth it.

 

Hope that helps...