Migrating from Webforms

[Telstra Software Licensing]

I have been looking at migrating from ASP.NET Web forms to MVC and going from UI for ASP.NET Ajax to Kendo. I assumed that the look and feel of the controls would be similar and that the controls I am using would also be available in Kendo. This is not the case.

For example, the Material theme for the Kendo Grid has a totally different look and feel than RadGrid. Moving to Kendo UI would totally change the look of my current application.

There also doesn't seem to many missing controls, such as RadPageLayout. This means that I would have to look for a new non-Telerik layout template and thus, add extra dependencies to my application.

I assumed that there would be similar capabilities and the themes would be comparable between the 2 products but this is obviously not the case. They appear be two totally separate products.

It does mean that I will be looking at other frameworks as the advantages that I thought came with migrating to Kendo from ASP.Net Ajax (compatible controls, same look and feel) don't actually exist.

[Rumen]

Hi there,

Indeed, the migration path from Web Forms to Kendo/MVC would be much convenient if both web suites offer similarly looking themes and components, however this is hardly achievable due to maturity, rendering, UI and UX.

For the themes, I would suggest to try the theme builder app that will help you to colorize the existing Kendo UI themes with the colors used by the Telerik AJAX components. Due to your valuable feedback, we decided to add color themes in the the theme builder that comply with the skins in UI for ASP.NET AJAX (Git issue). This will facilitated the migration process in terms of appearance.

As to the missing components in both Kendo and AJAX. Both suites are quite comprehensive and mature. They offers components for many business verticals and scenarios, however the Kendo suite still misses some components (File Explorer, Media Player, Prompt, Alert, Confirm Dialogs and other) available in the AJAX one. We will add them during 2016-2017. In regards to the PageLayout - we implemented it to facilitate the server developers who do not want to use Bootstrap to build the layout of their pages. In the Kendo UI world most of the developers prefer to use Bootstrap and for that reason we do not plan to provide Page Layout widget in this suite.

If you have more suggestions I'll be glad to hear them at [e-mail].

Best regards,
Rumen
Telerik