I need feedback

[Alejandro Ramos]

Hi people!
Well, I'm testing Telerik products, and I thinks that are great and very nice! but I need to confirm with a real project, because the demos always are great, so I'm looking for someone that are using this controls (actual version) in any real proyect, mainly asp.net and silverlight.
I've got to get some feedback, good and bad, before buy this product, regarding this funcionality, uses, things to take into account about grid and menu controls.
Please any comments is very very useful

Tanks in advance!

Alejandro

PS: If there is someone that talk/write spanish better for me!!

[hwsoderlund]

I have used the Telerik components (both asp.net and silverlight) for about 4 years now, and I would say that my experience has been 95% positive. The components are great, but the support is even better. They are very active here in the forums, usually you get replies within 24 hours. And the guys posting in the forums always know what they are talking about, whereas with many other software vendors you have to plough through at least one idiot and answer questions such as Have you installed the latest version? and Are you _really_ sure about that?  before you can get any real help. Sometimes I have needed bugs fixed asap due to deadlines and Telerik has always helped me by sending me private builds with the bug fixes.

If I was pressed to name a negative thing it would be that things sometimes (but not very often) break between releases. But I believe that when you have an aggressive release cycle (3-4 major releases each year) it is unavoidable to have some glitches here and there. And I very much prefer to have new features and bug fixes implemented quickly rather than having to wait 6 months or more before a new build appears. If that means I have to put up with minor bugs occasionally, then so be it.

/Henrik

[Alejandro Ramos]

Thanks a lot Henrik for your answer and I'm glad to hear that.
I've got some few question for you, if I may
Regarding performance, The grid controls (asp.net and Silverlight) Have you had any situations when you have to over work because you needed more speed? Some recomendation about any specific situation about preformance (numbers of rows, columns, controls in one page)?
Are all of Telekik controls easy to interact with standar .net controls?
Do you have any public site where you've used?

Thanks again, your answer was very useful.
Next week we are deciding wich controls packages to buy, and I looking some real info to choose Telerik.

BR,
Alejandro

PS: My english isn't very good, but I think you understand me, let me know if you don't

[hwsoderlund]

I have not really used the asp.net grid component that much, only in a small project about two years ago. I never had any performance problems then, but the amount of data in that project was quite small. I do not think we ever displayed more than 100 rows or so of data with 8-10 columns. So hopefully someone else can help you out with feedback on the asp.net grid.

As for the Silverlight grid, so far I have had no performance issues. I have tried using it with several thousands of rows and it is quite fast. The bottle neck when displaying collections that large is the client/server communication (I use WCF), and that of course has nothing to do with the components. I believe that there used to be some performance issues when using large amounts of columns, but that has been greatly improved with the column virtualization feature which was added in the latest release (I think, or maybe it was even earlier). You have probably seen it already, but there is a good demo of the virtualization features here:
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#GridView/UIVirtualization

[hwsoderlund]

I should also mention that I have not used the Silverlight datagrid for anything terribly advanced. Just plain old data in one level with server side paging, sorting and filtering. No hierarchies, no grouping or anything like that. But for my purposes it has worked like a charm.