Do you stick to the default ASP.NET controls because you doubt the productivity gains of third-party controls? Telerik Developer Evangelist, Jeff Fritz, gave himself a challenge: build the same application by allocating 30 minutes to working with the default Visual Studio toolset and 30 minutes to Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX. He then compared the results based on how much functionality he implemented and the amount of code he had to write. The productivity gap may surprise you.