I am still evaluating the winforms controls. I am quite impressed, however, the controls appear slow.

If I add (for testing purposes) 5 button, 5 labels and 5 textboxes it takes about 1+ sec to load the form and I get a flicker during the load process.
Compare this with the standard VS controls, where there is NO flicker and load time is instant?

Is there an explanation? Is it just that I haven't purchased the controls yet? Or is it that these control are simply slow?

Any information regarding this would be very useful

Regards
Andrew

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for evaluating our controls. We appreciate your feedback.

We have designed RadControls for WinForms to support features currently available only in WPF. These include hierarchy of themable elements, themes, animations, scaling, rotation, transparency. Nevertheless, RadControls support older operating systems and do not require a powerful graphics accelerator. The minimum requirements for RadControls are Windows 2k and .Net 2.0.

Due to the added features, some of our controls may not reach the performance of the standard windows controls - this is a trade-off we have to overcome daily. Our policy is to improve their performance constantly and we take seriously all performance related issues and try to address them as soon as possible.

When a form containing RadControls is shown for the first time, the theme(s) for these controls need to be loaded. This task consumes some time, especially if more than one themes are used on the form. This issue will disappear when opening the same form again. The slow loading may also happen when the CPU load is high or the hardware is older.

As to the flickering, we are aware of an issue that causes this in RadForm. I am not sure if you have stumbled upon the same issue, so could you, please send us your test application? We will investigate this case in detail. For your information, I tried to recreate the flickering with a RadForm, 5 buttons, 5 labels and 5 textboxes (all with default themes), but to no avail.

It would be valuable for us to hear about your experience about RadControls in general. Should you have any further questions, do not hesitate to ask.

 
All the best,
Jack
the Telerik team