Less new product - more stability in UI for WinForms New Product Suggestions

MattLynch

20 posts

Member since:
Jan 2007

Posted 07 Sep 2007 Link to this post

Hi,

I've noticed that there are ALOT of bugs in the RadControls for WinForms suite, release after release.

How about adding more error checking, some code comments, less hard coding and stabilizing the core features? Those would be good places to start.

Regards,

Matt

Vassil Petev

Admin

1765 posts

Posted 10 Sep 2007 Link to this post

Hello MattLynch,

Thank you for the feedback. Unfortunately, it does not give us much on the problems you have experienced. You could help us a lot more by sending us a list of issues you have stumbled upon so that we can address them. Feel free to post your test project as well - this way we can check the exact same problems you are seeing. We can move this Forum post to our support ticketing system to allow you to attach the files.

Once we review the list and the provided files we will be happy to discuss them with you. Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Rob
the Telerik team

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Lovsten

72 posts

Member since:
Aug 2007

Posted 18 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Matt, I agree. Also the performance is very bad. We just decided to shut down all development/tests using Telerik WinForms controls. Very disappointed must say.

MattLynch

20 posts

Member since:
Jan 2007

Posted 18 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Hi Lovsten,

To be fair to Telerik, my original message was posted after I had wasted days on customization. I was trying to use the control set to make a application look the way I wanted, not the way Telerik wanted.

I tried to remove the controls but my client wanted to keep them in because they look cool, which they do. Telerik have come along way with this control set since it was first released, and Q2 SP1 fixed heaps of issues. If you have the time to spend, you can really blow away your clients. Unfortunately, there is hardly any useful documentation[1] and you need to have extreme patience to get the code to work the way you want.

From my point of view, if you are unhappy with the way the controls are working, then the best thing to do is tell Telerik and they will generally do their best to fix the issue [2]. It's a little reactive (as opposed to pro-active) but I guess it's better than nothing.

[1] Note for moderators - Generated help files are not helpful. XML code comments are helpful.

Regards,

Matt.

Lovsten

72 posts

Member since:
Aug 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

I agree that Telerik has done a lot, but performance is so bad it is not useable for our professional application. For example, loading a telerik listbox takes 10 times longer than a MS listbox. Telerik Datagrid also extremly slow.

MattLynch

20 posts

Member since:
Jan 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Hi Lovsten,

I agree with you 100% - Performance doesn't seem to be addressed at all. I'm always hesitant to use these controls in a data bound sitation.

The product has only just become stable in the past month and I think that performance requirements were thrown out the door, in order to get the application stable. I think that Telerik should clearly list their goals and priorities. My goals include stability, usability, robustness, performance and aesthetics - in that order. My bet is that these types of goals are not on the list of product requirements.

I think that the prefix 'Rad' on RadControls is a oxymoron, of the worst possible kind. Unfortunately, the only way to get anything fixed is to complain to Telerik so that they fix the issues that are known. I would suggest being very vocal about all issues until they issues are fixed.
Personally, I would like to see a public bug list, or one that is at least visible to the customers. I can bet that you and I have both spent time on the same issues, but we would never know.

My client has already been sold on the functionality, so I'm stuck with the warts. When a bug pops up, it's me that looks bad, not Telerik. I'm sure that you can relate to this. I wish that Telerik would take this into account before assigning junior devs to the product.

Cheers,

Matt

Lovsten

72 posts

Member since:
Aug 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

You are spot on Matt. Everything you say, I totalt agree with. What would be interesting is to hear what Telerik has to say about all this.

Moderators - please comment on this!!!

MattLynch

20 posts

Member since:
Jan 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Hi Lovsten,

Judging from the number of posts in the support forum, I am gathering that you and I are both working closely with the product. I cannot count the number of changes that I would like to see, so I would invite you to contact me for offline collaboration on some changes. I believe that dealing with the support forum may take far longer. I would like to create a mailing list where we can collaborate and define a list of requirements, sorted by feature group and work out what is most important. Telerik will not support you in fixing the bugs on your own, but the process to report a bug is long and drawn out. I see this option as the only possible way to get issues addressed properly. My email address is M[at]ttLynch.net.

Currently, I take three steps backwards for every step forwards, and it's getting beyond a joke.

In fairness to Telerik, they have come along way, but not far enough for them to start patting each other on the back. Our software quality is directly affected by theirs, but this is something that does not seem to be getting through.

We could, of course, drop the product and use something else, though I am long past the point of no return. I have a 100k LOC UI framework that piggy backs on the Telerik product. It would cost me 10x the price of the product to remove it. This has been a hard lesson and next time I will seriously think before using a new third party control set. I don't like to think about how much money I have lost. Abandoning the product would mean that I see zero return on my investment.

BTW, Are you using the CAB Enabling kit as well?

Regards,

Matt Lynch.

Lovsten

72 posts

Member since:
Aug 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Great idea Matt. Unfortunately (like I said before) my project manager has decided what we are shutting down all development/testing on Telerik products for now. But we'll probably will have a look at it further down the line to see if any progress had been made by Telerik. Will contact you then. Best of luck.

PS! Are you based? I'm in Sweden and heading down to TechEd Dev i Barcelona in november. Are you going there? I've emailed Telerik if they are planning to exhibite there (think they did last year) but has not got a response on that (over a month ago).

MattLynch

20 posts

Member since:
Jan 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Hi Lovsten,

I'm not doing Tech.Ed this year, I am focussing my efforts on the Windows Server 2008 launch in february next year. I'm based in Australia, but I'm making my way over to Seattle to be closer to the action. I'm praying that the performance in Telerik's controls will be fixed by then, because it's going to be a very public showing.

It's sad to see that you have shut down development - the more people who are using the product, the better it will become. If you have time, I would love to see the list of issues that you have encountered, so I can avoid them too.

Cheers,

Matt

Lovsten

72 posts

Member since:
Aug 2007

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

I'll give you a quick summary of my problem areas:
* GridViewComboBoxColumn
* Grid - Add new row (had to build my own)
* Grid - getting it to act as Excel = quick and easy to mass edit, navigate
* Grid and Listbox - performance with databind to business objects are very bad.
* Grid- No EnsureVisible on cell.
* Grid - Export to Excel - None existing. Had to write my own.
* Grid - Databinding to numeric values fails.
* Theme Manager - Huge memory leak.
* Saving grid layout per user - None existing. Had to write my own.
* Calendar - User picking only full weeks.
* DateTimePicker - Is crap. Not a datetimepicker. Its a datepickerdatetimeshower, no way of selecting time.
* Themes - got most fixed with readonly cells and OddRows. But couldn't get mouseover to change background an full row. BTW Jack is a great support guy on Themes. Helped me a lot.

Well, thats the "short list". There should be posts about all these in the forum. A lot of other minor stuff as well. If you got any direct questions I'm sure I can take some time to help you. Best of luck. Hope things shape up at Telerik.

Vassil Petev

Admin

1765 posts

Posted 19 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Guys, I have replied back to you via email, instead of using this forum. I decided to do it this way, not because we do not want to take public responsibility of our actions, but rather because the email contains some confidential information on our plans. I am also sure that you will want further details on what we plan to do for Q3 2007 onwards, which I will be glad to share with you privately.

At any rate, if you feel that this action is not OK, I will be glad to share any non-confidential information with all of you.

Magnus, just in the name of fairness, I want to make a note about your list of problems: we should not consider missing features as issues, simply because such features do not exist. We may consider promised, but still missing features as issues, but I honestly believe in transparency and I think that Telerik has always been transparent in this regard. For example, RadGrid does offer export to Excel in Q2 2007, and the DateTimePicker has been noted to be read-only (this control is actually listed under RadCalendar in the Release notes, as we do not have such control at the moment). I understand your frustration and I am in no way trying to question the problems you have found with our controls. I just ask for fairness.

Thanks in advance. I will be glad to answer any questions you may have.

All the best,

Vassil Petev
Product Manager
the Telerik team

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Lovsten

72 posts

Member since:
Aug 2007

Posted 21 Oct 2007 Link to this post

Vassil,

Thanks for your respons. To comment back on your statement in here about not all I listed was issues. If you read my post correctly I just wanted to list my PROBLEM areas to Matt. Never claimed they all are bugs in your component. But as developer not only bugs are problems, also functionality we would like to have but does not exists could be a problem for us.

Will comment later on the private email.

Regard
Lovsten

erwin

404 posts

Member since:
Dec 2006

Posted 22 Jul 2008 Link to this post

Still, a published list of known bugs would help A LOT. I'm only scratching
at the surface of Telerik Controls for WinForms Q1 2008 for a
couple of days now and already reported half a dozen or so bugs.

Biggest problem at the moment are numerous redrawing bugs and slow
performance. That's bad when you look at the advertisements where Telerik
boasts the visual appearance of the controls. What good is that if there are
redrawing bugs everywhere?

To be clear: I like many of the basic ideas behind the controls but at
the moment it's not possible to build a stable professional product on top of
Rad Controls for Windows Forms.

I don't want to release a product that crashes with unhandled exceptions if the user clicks
on the "wrong" part of a control or plays around with filtering in the grid.

Let's hope that Q2 will be a major improvement. I'd prefer more stability over
more unstable new feature any time.

Dimitar Kapitanov

Admin

632 posts

Posted 28 Jul 2008 Link to this post

Hi Erwin,

We all agree on the fact that better quality instead of more, but maybe rarely used features would add more value to RadControls for WinForms suite.

Our primary goal for the recent releases is to improve the stability and performance further with every release. For Q1 2008 we shipped an entirely new RadGridView, much faster and stable than its predecessor. For Q2 2008 we had a major rework for the RadComboBox and ListBox controls, which now have their memory leaks reduced to minimum. However, you know that RadControls for WinForms is an incredibly complex framework, requiring a lot of testing and enhancements (with requirements based on customer requests that are often contradictory), and every now and then there are issues that just slip off our sight and pop up in your application.

What we can do and are doing is to constantly increase and improve our test scenarios and test series. We cover your bug reports with tests, thus avoiding recurring bugs. Unfortunately that process of quality improvement takes its time and the results of that effort will pay their due in the forthcoming releases.

I can assure you that we are aimed at providing higher quality in terms of stability and performance to our controls, which means more value to you as a customer!

Best wishes,
Dimitar Kapitanov
the Telerik team

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TwoLaJit

38 posts

Member since:
Nov 2006

Posted 23 May 2009 Link to this post

In regards to Winforms...

A feature that is missing that I consider a bug are some of the more basic features that I have seen from the standard out of box controls from visual studio 2008. E.g Tab Scrolling in design view the tabcontrol. e.g Ability to add submenu items in raddropdownbuttonelement in the radtoolbar control. (you can do this in radmenu but not in radtoolbars)

I also noticed that most of the replies to this thread were from 2007 and I think the winform controls have come a long away since then. But i am just a new comer so I do not know. I have tired DevExpress Winforms and Infragistics winforms and I enjoy using RadControls for winforms overall so I would like to see continued improvements in teleriks winforms controls. I honestly believe telerik has the opportunity here to remove all doubt from everyone because I find telerik controls superior and more intuitive to use than DevExpress and Infragistics. Devexpress and Infragistics controls look and feel extremely dated, like i am making win 3.1 programs. I get to taste the future with Telerik.

Telerik's ASP controls I have no issues with.

Jordan

Admin

547 posts

Posted 25 May 2009 Link to this post

Hi TwoLaJit,

Thank you for writing. Both features that you suggested will improve the design time experience of RadControls for WinForms. We will start looking for a way to implement them. Unfortunately I cannot give you an exact time frame about when these features will be ready because we have a lot of other high priority tasks already planned. However, there is a chance we will be able to implement them for the upcoming Q2 2009 release.

Indeed, we have greatly improved RadControls for WinForms in the last couple of releases and we will continue doing that. We are glad to see that you enjoy working with our controls.

Kind regards,
Jordan
the Telerik team

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erwin

404 posts

Member since:
Dec 2006

Posted 16 Jul 2009 Link to this post

It's now a year after my last post, and I'm not much better off.

While the controls have improved a bit, 2009 Q2 was a big step back.

Documentation still outdated or simply not available.
Still my app (and even the telerik demo) crashes with one click (well I admit it's a right mouse click this time) on the "wrong" spot.

So far within one year I had exaclty one build of my app with no noticeable showstopper bugs within telerik code, and that was with "unsupported" interim builds and custom rewriting of functionality that should be "out of the box" (the excel exporting feature).

I wonder if anybody released a product based on telerik WinForms controls to a greater audience and what the experience was.

Regards
Erwin