How is ASP.NET Support ?

[Uday]

Can we do rapid application development like telerik for enterprise asp.net web application ?

[Christopher Tallos]

I'm going to catch hell for this from the community at large but imho the answer is an emphatic NO.  While the support for KendoUI is there, the documentation is absolutely terrible and outdated.  I have been working to get a site together using KendoUI Mobile and I can hardly even figure out how to get a form into a view, let alone fire a server side event to send an email.  While I love the product and what it offers, I'm saddened I spent so much money to purchase it.  I made a terribly bad decision and now I am paying for it dearly.

[Curt Rabon]

Agree completely with Uday.  You need to know up front that this is a client-side (JavaScript) toolkit; the controls are not accessible server-side.  You would need to have mostly static web-methods on your .aspx pages (or .asmx/WCF) that allow the Kendo datasource to get data from and send data to.  If you really want to succeed, you also need a very solid understanding of "modern style JavaScript" (anonymous functions, callbacks, and objects using JSON format).  The documentation is horribly poor, which makes it rough.

It *can* be used with ASP.Net, but it was not intended to work with it (at least not now in version 1).  The most unbelievable thing is that Telerik just released JSP Java helpers, before making them for ASP.Net.  And finally, when their support people respond to your support ticket, they send you ASP.Net MVC samples without asking...blindly assuming the whole world is using MVC.

[Atanas Korchev]

Hi guys,

Let me first remind you that Kendo UI is an HTML5/JavaScript library. It is not tied to any server-side platform. We have customers using Kendo UI with ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Spring MVC, Ruby on Rails, Django etc. 

 You can find some resources for using Kendo UI in ASP.NET WebForms in our documentation and blogs. Start here for example. We also have a few sample applications created for ASP.NET WebForms. The source code is available on github as well.

 As for claims that our documentation is horrible - please let us know which parts of it are considered "horrible" so we can improve them. As can be seen above we do have documentation and tutorials for using ASP.NET WebForms.
 
Finally if you need web controls for ASP.NET you can always use RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax which is another product of Telerik. It provides all the benefits of ASP.NET WebForms - controls, design time support etc. We even have controls for some Kendo UI widgets e.g. Chart and Gauge.

Regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team

[jon]

Just responding to Atanas wanting to know which sections of the document is horrible.  That would be the everything between the first and last word.  The whole lot needs a re-write AND STRUCTURED like other Telerik help.  Component One has a brilliant help format.

[James]

I don't know if I would agree that they assume everyone uses MVC, because the documentation is horrible for that as well.  The UI demos are missing for MVC for many of the features.  And please don't ask me to say where, because you can click on each example and see which ones don't have a header for MVC.  So let's go with a more general statement that support is poor to non-existent.

The main thing to keep in mind is that Kendo has a feeling of being bleeding edge, so you will be left frustrated trying to get anything beyond basic things to work.  Our thought is that if it's not exactly like the demo, don't bother trying to use Kendo.  You will need to take any project estimates and multiple them by four.

Telerik was awesome though.