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Comment by ninv | Hacker News Reader

Telerik makes awful .Net components. I have used them in past. I was frustrated with their breaking changes, they had the worst release management. Every year they used to release new version and used to outright removed the methods or replace the signatures. No Deprecation!

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In the past 8 years I've been involved in more projects to remove Telerik than to use it. The performance and long term maintenability of these drag and drop with no code! components are never well advertised. But I guess it solved a massive issue when companies thought design was cheaper with a consistent skin, forgetting that their programmers would still need to layout everything.

I'm using the Telerik Reporting product. I have to agree that the promoted drag and drop approach is pretty pathetic. Though using it at a programmable level hasn't been too bad. I've been able to do most things I've needed to do without too much heartache.

We briefly evaluated Telerik Reporting, but when a support technician during a technical conversation referred to 16,000 rows as "a large data set" that pretty much turned us off to it.

I have to strongly disagree. I have used their Sliverlight components in every SL project I have been involved with for the last four years and I could`t live without them. They are professional components for enterprise which does something that a open-source project could seldom( maybe never) do, support all the odd-cases needed. These are all the weird cases that no one would bother to implement in an OS-project, since it`s very seldom needed, but since they know that their customers might need this functionally they have already implemented it. Just look at the feature list for their GridView component for SL and try to match that with an OS-project. Combining this with good support and you got a winner.

As a result the good experiences I had with their components in a SL context I am know adopting their KendoUI components together with ReactJs. So far all the points made above for SL still stands for KendoUI.

Try Infragistics, you will never look back.

Both Telerik and Infragistics have their main development offices in Sofia, Bulgaria. From what I've heard most of Infragististics developers/testers/managers have worked for Telerik in the past and there is a considerable current in the other direction as well. I wouldn't expect a massive difference in the quality.

Could you give me some examples of why you switched to Infragistics and never looked back. And also some info on which platforms you have used it on?

What is the benefit of using KendoUI over any of the free JS options available? Edge cases again?

Lets do an example. In many of the enterprise applications I work on large datagrids are used. I did a loot of research in order to find the best open alternative, from what I found this seems to be http://datatables.net/ . It seems like a great product with a lots of features, plugins and ways to tweak it. But still KendoUI`s got features like proper grouping, binding to remote data(filtering, sorting, grouping etc), advanced filtering, fast customisation of headers/rows/cells, proper select/multi-select and so on. Im aware that you could probably do all these things with Datatables, but still you would have to find the appropriate plugins, browse through bad documentations and properly end up implementing half of the missing features your self. Of course this could be done, but with KendoUI you got it all out of the box, with proper documentation. And if you don`t figure it out, you got professional support with fast response(great for junior dev). Yes KendoUi got a steep licence cost, but it don`t take long to realize that it`s worth it. I could to exactly the same example for the TreeView component(and to some degree the Data Visualization package, though the open alternatives seems much more competitive, if not better, here).

So to answer your question, from my experience using KendoUI reduces the time needed for the average developer to complete the task.

Thanks for the "OS" rant. You should use the proper term, Free Software, next time: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Your absolutely right. Free Software was the term is was referring to. And if it came out as a rant that was not my purpose at all, but to share a positive experience about Telerik`s products.

We're using the kendo ui mvvm, It seems like they forked knockout js, and just did their own thing. It's kind of awful. I kind of wish I had fought harder to use Angular js.

Kendo is indeed a "fork" of many things. Knockout, Backbone, underscore templates with different delimiters, bootstrap, many existing ui widgets (chosen comes to mind). About the only thing they didn't fork was jQuery itself. But at least you get all of the above in a single product. I guess that's a bonus?

I have personally fought to work around their widgets more times than I've worked with them. And have dropped integrating their widgets into new projects, to avoid the bloat/overhead.

We are still using the original ASP.NET MVC extensions that they released as open source before they went on to develop Kendo.

I've used a fair few .NET controls from various vendors and they all are challenging in different ways. The common problem is that they force you to do things in a particular way.

If I was to rebuild our product it would not be using any of this heavy backend style server controls.

It is history as far as I can see. JavaScript front-end frameworks and REST services even with .NET is where Microsoft seem to be headed as well.

...and now they are working on their own JavaScript-for-mobile-apps language - what could possibly go wrong: http://www.telerik.com/nativescript

I agree. Seems like we even had problems with incremental releases... removed methods and changed signatures.

So i was working on a small decision support system for a hospital. Some designer recommended their chart control and i used it in project.

In final stage, client asked for empty values support, i check and found that in next release they have this feature. So i said yes and gave them 1 week estimate. Assuming all i have to do is replace radchart dll.

But, I was wrong. I upgraded the Radchart and found 70% code is not working. Forget working, it's not even compiling anymore. Insted of deprecating the method, they remove it right away in next minor release.

I don't think there was any architect or senior programmers in their team.

In my previous company designers or managers fell for their shiny features and got trapped. Crappy product!

Another HP+Autonomy kinda scam.

You just need to be more agile.

Agile doesn't mean redoing the whole app everytime third party vendor releases the minor version.

I've had good luck using their Kendo UI Web components in an Angular context. Their Grid component is hard to beat.

I don't really agree, I've used their web stuff with kendo ui and WPF stuff, they do lack a good documentation, and had things breaking with a minor release or half done things they shouldn't have released, but they have lot of solid controls that save weeks or months of work.

Yes. I had RadControls inflicted upon me once.

I, like many people here by the looks, spent a good deal of time removing them. We had one issue where the page response with an AJAX Manager (or whatever it was called) was 5x as slow than a full page refresh. Turns out it was POSTing 2Mb of crap for some reason.

I'd rather eat my own poop that use their software again.

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