Hi Telerik support,
We have been evaluating your WPF controls on and off over the last year or so with a view to putting together a large app that would use a large number of them. I have to say that as of the last update we are on the verge of throwing in the towel in frustration at incessant changes to interfaces, class depreciations and general usage changes to the controls.
From a quick search in this forum:
May 2007, in answer to exactly the same complaint:
Well, sorry, but as far as I can see you have introduced breaking changes on pretty much every single release.
I had assumed when we first started the trial that the product line was young and thus the interfaces might take a little time to settle down, but the changes show no sign of settling down over a year later (and 4 years after your comment!) and require our code to be rewritten, often in non-trivial ways.
We all appreciate the need for change, but there are limits and there has to be a balance between functionality and interface stability. I think there has been plenty of time to get much of this right by now, surely?
How does everyone else justify additional code fix/rewrite and QA time to the business every time they need to upgrade the telerik controls to fix a bug or implement a new feature released in the telerik control set? Am I to assume that we cannot upgrade the telerik controls without major rewrites of our code?
You guys have a great product and I hope you take this as constructive criticism but you have more competitors now than ever and I actually want to go on and purchase from you; but we are reviewing competitors again because you are giving us no choice. Given your statement before and what we have seen since I hope you can offer something more concrete than 'general policy' statements.
I would love to hear what telerik and other forum users feel about this.
We have been evaluating your WPF controls on and off over the last year or so with a view to putting together a large app that would use a large number of them. I have to say that as of the last update we are on the verge of throwing in the towel in frustration at incessant changes to interfaces, class depreciations and general usage changes to the controls.
From a quick search in this forum:
May 2007, in answer to exactly the same complaint:
It is a general policy at Telerik to only introduce breaking changes when the
benefits of the new version significantly outweigh the disadvantages of not
having a straightforward upgrade process. Nevertheless, in the rare cases when
breaking changes are introduced we do our best to thoroughly document all
changes and encourage customers to go through the "Changes and backwards
compatibility" articles before upgrading to a new major version
Well, sorry, but as far as I can see you have introduced breaking changes on pretty much every single release.
I had assumed when we first started the trial that the product line was young and thus the interfaces might take a little time to settle down, but the changes show no sign of settling down over a year later (and 4 years after your comment!) and require our code to be rewritten, often in non-trivial ways.
- Solutions to relatively simple problems often rely on overriding templates which then get radically changed
- Properties become 'read only' - presumably the thinking is that this softens the blow. It does not.
- Properties get renamed (I can live with this one so long as it's just a rename and semantics not changed as well)
- Class depreciated. Not much fun if you were overriding these or using the events.
- etc.
We all appreciate the need for change, but there are limits and there has to be a balance between functionality and interface stability. I think there has been plenty of time to get much of this right by now, surely?
How does everyone else justify additional code fix/rewrite and QA time to the business every time they need to upgrade the telerik controls to fix a bug or implement a new feature released in the telerik control set? Am I to assume that we cannot upgrade the telerik controls without major rewrites of our code?
You guys have a great product and I hope you take this as constructive criticism but you have more competitors now than ever and I actually want to go on and purchase from you; but we are reviewing competitors again because you are giving us no choice. Given your statement before and what we have seen since I hope you can offer something more concrete than 'general policy' statements.
I would love to hear what telerik and other forum users feel about this.