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Which Silverlight Control Set is better? Telerik or ComponentArt?
I have used ComponentArt, but I just reviewed Telerik and it looks like they might have better functionality for the same price.
If you have used both, then please let me know your opinion.
ive been using Telerik controls for about 3 years. at this point i dont plan on doing any UI work without them...ever.
Support team is amazing
large dev community
tight integration with VS
releases are in step with MS releases
NO LICENSE REQUIRED ON INDVIDUAL MACHINES JUST THE DLLS
i have no idea what the gent who replied they are difficult to install/unistall from a project is talking about...honestly. in regards to "replacing a radpanel with something light weight takes a day" they are built on top of aspnet ajax and actually have more features and performance wise (in respect to xmlhttp panel) they are much faster. aspnet does full page cycle its not even ajax its just a trick to surpress the page blink. same traffic can be seen in fiddler with or without them. much less with telerik.
as far as SL controls go. they are without any doubt the best on the market
The best solution that I have found is to try out Telerik's controls yourself and you will be happy:) They offer a 60 day trial period that can even be extended and you can get support during the trial period.
I've inherited codebases infested with Telerik garbage in the past, and I would strongly recommend avoiding their stuff at all cost.
The one good thing I can say about them is that it only takes about a day of effort to remove their terrible Ajax RadPanel stuff and replace it with something lightweight and sane.
I've not tried their Silverlight stuff, but having seen the quality of their other products, I don't plan on doing so.
I used Telerik controls for AJAX in my projects in the last couple of years and so far I do not have any complaints. My productivity boosted to a great extent and my clients are very happy with the results.
Jason, I do not know why you consider the Telerik AJAX controls as a low quality toolset - the ajax panels are simply wrappers around the asp UpdatePanels with some thingies that helps you manage async requests. Furthermore, their ajax manager is quite handy when you want to define declarative ajax relations through the designer or initiate ajax requests from the client and intercept them on the server with simplified coding.
I am beginning to evaluate their Silverlight toolset as well for some of my future projects and at this point my impressions are rather positive than negative (compared to ComponentArt).
Dick
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I have been looking on SO and can't seem to find something more recent than around 2008.
I am looking for an alternative to Microsoft Access with similar capabilities. I.e:
Forms
Macros
Reports
Etc
In another question VS Lightswitch was recommended (Still in Beta 2). I had a look at it, although it seems good it is still reasonably new and unsuported at this stage.
My main purpose is to have a DB that is simple, portable and can be accessed easily (mostly by 1 person at a time, but also sometimes by multiple people). I know Access can provide this and if it seems to be the best solution I might stick with it, but are there anything else out there that someone has found useful for custom data capture, filtering and creating reports?
I know that Visual Studio or alike can be used, but would prefer something more in line with Access.
The link to similar questions are (but seem to be somewhat old):
Front-End for MS Access migration?
Replacing MS Access forms
Alternatives to Access
Good Free Alternative To MS Access
People are usually looking for Alternative to MS Access either because:
They, for some reasons, consider
that Microsoft is Evil
They don't want to pay for the extra Access licensing
For people from Group 1,I do not have that much to say. I was part of it till I realised how fast and simple it was to use some of these great software (not all ...) sold for a very fair price. Up to now, I have spared years of headache using them. Thanks Microsoft, I owe you one.
For people from group 2, there is a runtime\free version of Access that you can deploy (for free, I insist) on your final user's computers. It means that you do not have to buy any basic office software for your users but you still can have your users running an Access App on their machines ...
Try OpenOffice.org. It has the Base program, which is similar to Access. It is also free and open source.
One of the reasons people are looking for this is because Access 2013 is quite different than previous versions and it looks like it will soon be the end of the road for this product. The problem with Kexi and Base as well as the other office clone versions is that they are very weak in their support for scripting. With MS VBA many things can be accomplished which are not available in these (as yet).
Access has a built in IDE for developing VBA and it is almost the full visual basic 6 IDE with nice a debugger etc. The only product I have found thus far which have something like this usually have a much higher price tag than access. (Alpha 5)
You can Consider Kaxi ( http://kexi-project.org/ ) , as it a database component of KDE-office.
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At company I'm working, new project will be started soon. I'd like to use Silverlight 2.0 but I need to convince my CEO and Photoshop/AfterEffects guy for using Silverligt for upcoming project. These persons are - let's say - rather Flash / Apple oriented, but for me as a .NET developer Silverlight seems to be proper solution :-)
I have a list of advantages from developer's point of view but I need to show for these non-technical persons any working demos .
These applications could be business applications, but the most important features are:
fancy graphics - not a developer manufacture,
comfortable and interesting UI,
functionalities which are difficult to implement in Flash
Thanks.
I find that folks really like Quince:
(source: sparklingclient.com)
One of my favorites is Centre des Usages:
(source: sparklingclient.com)
Telerik have a couple of nice looking demos of their controls
This silverlight showcase will probably have something you can use
There are some killer visual effects in SL3:
http://blogs.msdn.com/henryh/archive/2009/03/20/mix09-the-gratuitous-graphics-demo.aspx
That demo is pretty awesome. Be sure to mention out of browser support, which you can't do in flash (though I understand other adobe technologies support OOB). Other posts on stack overflow have pointed to there being more 3rd party controls for SL than Flash but I don't have any stats to back it up.
Surely you don't need Demo's of fancy graphics or comfortable and interesting UI's. Since this would be by design and would be implementable in Flash or Silverlight.
Surely things like the fact that existing programmer knowledge can be extended into the rich UI because you can reuse your .Net skills would be the key thing. Being able to deliver functionality rather that just "flash"....
The showcase above is quite good, but the argument is still going to come back from the people who are used to using flash by saying "Yea, but we could do that in flash".
You need to show them what additional functionality Silverlight would allow for which you are battling to implement using flash. The down side is that if you can not do that, and you have a company with resources that is already trained in building things in Flash, you may be better off staying with Flash.
Becoming more familier with Silverlight yourself would help you to explain the strengths of SilverLight and all the good things. Time for that Hello World Silverlight app to be created.
Most of the things that you can do in Flash/Air can be done in Silverlight and vice versa. even if they are some things you can do in one but not the other, they might not be applicable to your scenario. picking the tool is one task. Assuming you have picked Silverlight then comes the difficult task do you use Code Behind, MVP, MVC, MVVM, Prism, Caliburn, SLExtensions. and once you pick the pattern you use, you will soon find there are n-variations of each with no definitive guidance
I would say if dev's are familiar with .net go with Silverlight
I met the CEO of this company on Tuesday, so I have no prior affiliation or vested interest. (But, he was a nice enough guy, so I'll give him this free plug.) Both the apps you see on this page are pretty cool, and the first is a Silverlight app.
http://www.atamagroup.com/
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WPF is positioned as a successor to WinForms, but given Microsoft's practice of abandoning toolkits (and what I perceive a s"bloat" in WPF), are there any recommended alternatives?
I don't think you need to worry about WPF being abandoned. WinForm was around for a long time, and WPF is the replacement.
Bloat? I don't know. It seems like a huge upgrade from WinForms to me. If there's bloat it's always going to be there because underneath everything is the Win32 API. Until that gets rewritten from scratch I don't think anything will be perfect. And since every toolkit targeted at the Windows platform has to deal with that, I had rather go with WPF and ReSharper.
Another sign Microsoft is serious about WPF is that it's getting used to make Visual Studio 2010. XAML seems to get used by more than just WPF (Workflow Foundation, Communication Foundation).
I've been coding in WinForms for the past 5 years and I was a bit sceptic of WPF too at first. But after reading a few books and trying out my first application in WPF I'm starting to see the beauty of it!
I keep amazing myself at how little "glue" code is needed in a WPF application compared to how I would have done it in WinForms. Here's an example: I had to show a simple histogram. In WinForms I would have written a custom control and handled the rendering myself. In WPF, I did it all from xaml without one line of code! I just bound the data samples to a list box, replaced the listbox's layout template to an horizontal stack panel, and replaced the item template to rectangles which height is bound to the sample values!
MS does not have a practice of abandoning toolkits (WinForms, MFC, ActiveX and Win32 are all still being actively developed) and the "bloat" is actually new capabilities you may not need right now but there's a good chance you'll need in the future.
If you don't want bloat and use only an API that will be impossible for MS to stop supporting you are more then welcome to work with the Win32 API directly.
I believe 4 out of 5 developers never ever look beyond the surface of a technology, they just want to drag & drop a few controls, write a few lines of code and get something up & running, maybe googling for some samples to help iron out a few kinks, and that's it. To such folks, bloat is not a word in their dictionary.
I, for one, prefer to look under the covers and really figure out how a technology actually works before jumping into writing code using the technology. Today, I spent an hour or so to investigate how the WPF built-in commands work, and with the help of reflector i managed to track down how a simple built-in Cut command is executed for a plain-vanilla textbox control, and guess what, by the time the text changed event is raised for a cut operation, there are around 30 calls on the call stack, isn't that code bloat?
WPF certainly has many powerful functionalities, but they do come at a cost. In some ways, i feel that WPF is to WinForms what MFC is to Win32 API; both WPF and MFC has the word "Foundation" at least :), but it would be interesting to watch if WPF will come to the same fate of MFC.
It depends on your favorite programming language, but Qt is a good Gui toolkit for C++. It has impressive features, is free and as platform independent as it gets for GUI toolkits.
Qt Quick (QML) is the way to go. It has extremely sharp design, and it is kept from being polluted by XML unreadability.
Adobe AIR is the strong competitor. If you aim to create cross-platform applications with rich user interface, check out this one.
First of all, I love WPF! I don't see any elegant/immediate way to achieve the same functionality and flexibility for designing interfaces in WinForms... That said, it is very sad to see that WPF is not anymore in favor inside Microsoft. Actually some people, including 'insiders' have stated that MS has shifted focus form WPF, and the Silverlight is now THE Windows Phone 7 application framework (not something to supplant Flash anymore):
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/microsoft_html_5/
Many people, including the current WPF Leader, denies this, but I see that this may actually have some truth behind. HTML5 is certainly going to become the "de facto" standard for rich (web)client interfaces. It overlaps so much with WPF, and does many other things too. It can "easily" be extended to work for non-web rich-client applications, and I believe MS will invest in that to have the lead in development tools for both web, mobile and windows targets.
I would not fear abandonment if I was already in the middle of a WPF project, but I wouldn't start one in WPF either as many have already said: it is not that simple to abandon something like WPF without giving a migration path and supporting it for many years.
So, current alternatives for WPF in the MS world? I don't think we have one already, maybe using its subset in Silverlight is the way to go for now. But, in the upcoming years HTML5 will probably be THE alternative to WPF.
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I had a discussion with some colleagues mentioning that there are not too many projects that we do which make use of WPF for creating UI for a windows application (we almost always use Windows Forms instead).
Are your experiences the same - i.e. there is not too much adoption of this technology?
Why do you think that is? And will we have a time when we see much more of WPF?
Have a look at this survey it was done by a Windows Forms Contol Vendor in Australia.
Personally I have worked on two commercial projects in the last year that were using WPF to varying degrees.
The adoption of WPF is on the rise. Microsoft I believe is putting all their eggs into the WPF basket.
WPF Rocks in terms of what the technology can do. It's simply the best UI building technology on the planet (my opinion). But, but there is a huge initial and long term investment in learning and getting your head around it. Also from tooling perspective it has barriers like unusable Cider designer, you've to get blend to do styling etc.
I am sure it will become popular, but would take time. But right now it's not so popular.
Check this thread on WPF
Check this conversation on msdn forums about WPF for LOB apps
Absolutely - the adoption is tiny. There was lots of hype but it does not seem to have materialized.
I used WPF for one project and I can certainly say it left a very unfinished taste in my mouth. It was far too difficult to acheive simple things and the whole thing had very many rough edges - the reasons behind them certainly existed but were not obvious or even visible at all. The Visual Studio designer completely bugged out for most of my pages and I never did figure out why...
All in all, I'd say WPF is barely beta-quality from a developer friendliness standpoint.
WPF has a steep learning curve, and the development tools for it (expression studio/web) are expensive, so, I'm not surprised that the industry has not jumped on it. However, in terms of Windows programming, it is much more robust and powerful than Windows Forms, so I would like to see its popularity grow over the next few years as Microsoft makes improvements to WPF, WCF, and .NET in general. If MS would decrease the price of its Expression products, I would expect to see the framework's popularity grow much faster.
Another troubling thing about WPF is the total lack of good online tutorials for the framework. I'm trying to learn WPF at home, and I have found it to be a pain in the neck. I had to fork over a ton of cash for the development tools, and then I had to pay more money for a good book because there just isn't enough online to really get me into the framework and its languages. I can learn quite a bit about Java for free just by visiting the Sun website, but for WPF, I have to get a book. There is also a terrible lack of reference materials, in my experience, for WPF. To me, it reminded me of programming in VB6. Unless these things are remedied, I wouldn't expect to see any rapid growth in the framework. I do believe the main driving force behind the industry's adoption of the WPF and WCF technologies is MS support.
Though WPF was introduced few years ago it was too raw to use it in the real world apps. Major problem that stops WPF from wide adoption is a lack of RAD tools and out-of-box components. Currently we have Blend, more or less working Cider, but usable versions of these tools came not so long ago. Another reason is a completely different architecture which leads to longer development time as compared with WinForms due to prolonged learning\adoption period for developers.
I think we will see rising of WPF in the next few years.
People usually jump the technology bandwagon when there is a a real productivity to gain. Something to compensate for all the productivity loss that normally occurs when you adopt a new platform. WPF is just not there yet. It still takes more effort and more time to build a WPF app than a Forms app, and by a long shot.
Combine this with less documentation on the net about WPF than Windows Forms, less people with WPF experience, less blogs on WPF, less books on WPF, less tips/tricks,etc.
And don't get me started on XAML. Is it XML? is it a script? is it a code? Why did they decide that a hyperlink is just a label property? A lot of things still need to be ironed out there.
I cannot afford to build my next project in WPF, it will cost me a lot more to do it (in manpower and time), with nothing to show for in return. At the moment all we do in WPF is pure-research-inhouse-hobby projects.
I'm currently working on a WPF project - my first one. The learning curve has been incredibly steep, but in the end I think WPF is a great technology. The potential is fantastic, especially for advancing the state of data visualisation. I really like the data binding features, and the potential of styling. But it really does take a while to get your head around this.
I think that Silverlight adoption will eventually drive WPF adoption back on the desktop - or maybe there won't be a desktop as much of what can be accomplished with Silverlight will replace many previously desktop applications.
I am playing around with WPF and I must say I am not impressed. I seek a technology which will help me be productive in creating business applications. I remember building my first classic ASP website and being disgusted at the spaghetti code required to build a simple app. Viewing a single page I found HTML and java script mixed with vbscript with include files and calls to com objects--in short, a bloody illogical mess. In my view, it is important to have a simple and VISUAL development model with standards. I built many VB6 and .Net windows apps and they have a simple metaphor for development, making them easy to debug and modify by developers who did not write the original app. Forms encapsulate presentation logic, modules and classes in referenced assemblies encapsulate business logic and data logic. ADO.Net and other tools make data access robust, scalable, dynamic and customizable. Resizing windows controls and graphics to suit monitor resolution or client preference is easily done with Win Forms.
It may be that WPF has many advanced features in graphics, but for most business apps, form should follow function--in other words, I am not putting goofy animated graphics on my banking windows app.
One of the reasons I have not liked web development is because of the wide variety of ever-changing and complex technologies required for relatively simple applications which don't deliver enough significant change in actual functional results.
Oh well, that's my two cents.
' )
We deployed a pretty major WPF application for a large investment bank I worked for. It turned out extremely successful, involving 3d visualization of OLAP data that allowed quicker trend analysis. It's being used extensively.
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Basically I'm going to go a bit broad here and ask a few questions to get a bit of a picture of how people are handling UI these days.
Lately I've found it pretty easy to do some fancy things with UI design and with WPF specifically we're finding new ways to do layouts that are better looking and more functional for the user, but in contrast one of the business focused guys at our local .NET User Group wouldn't even think of using WPF until it had a datagrid that he could use to make Excel like input forms.
So basically, have you rethought the design of your business apps as you move to Web/WPF/Silverlight designs, because for us at least - in winforms we kept things fairly functional and uniform, or are you trying to keep that "known" UI?
Would a dedicated design guy (for larger teams), or a dev with more design chops rank higher when looking at hiring these days? (Check out what a designer did for Scott Hanselman's BabySmash and Microsoft's Prism demo)
Are there any design hints/tips/guidelines you use for your UI - especially for WPF?
What sites would you recommend for design?
I recommend that you read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think first. The book has a great checklist of things that you have to take into consideration when designing your UIs. While it's focused on web usability, a lot of the lessons therein are valuable even to desktop application designers.
That being said, whether you use Windows forms or WPF or Flash or whatever new and shiny thing that comes around is, it is of utmost importance to hire either a) a real designer, or b) a development guy with a lot of UI design experience, either of which who can provide you a serious URL for their design portfolio. It will help a lot not only in improving the design of your application but also unburdening your developers from thinking about UI design, and allow them to focus on the back-end code.
As for "business focused" guys -- it would be really great if you would get the opinion of actual customers and stake holders, and have them do some usability testing for your application. It's their opinion that would matter most.
I think it would not be difficult to get a good designer up to speed on Microsoft Expression Blend to whip up some good XAML designs that your team could use to come up with a really good product.
Here's a great screen cast where Billy Hollis goes into many of these issues:
http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=115
I think WPF can greatly improve user experience.
However there are not much business oriented controls out there which means you need to do a lot by yourself.
As for designers I think it's really hard to find WPF designer now days, it still would be a dedicated programmer rather then design-only guy.
I hope that this situation will change in nearest feature.
I think it's worth at least start experimenting with WPF to be able to compete with upcoming solutions.
The whole concept of re-thinking a UI of an existing application is dependent on the target audience. For a boring business application, like accounting or budgeting, it may even be counter-productive. For one, users of those kinds of apps may have used a similar looking and feeling UI for years and years, and second, looking too "cute" and colorful can even bring a perception of toy-ishness (is that a word?) with it.
We have done several new projects with the latest & greatest UI gadgets, and for the most part for new applications it seems to be a good chance to get some feedback from a live audience. Then it gets easier to translate that feedback into existing applications.
We also have some apps which are still actively developed (and used obviously), where the UI looks almost like in Windows 3.1. They're awful, gray, clunky, and our only real designer is always trying to get a permission to bring it to the current centrury - but the biggest customer actively refuses this. They say it's just fine, people know how to use it, and it works even in their oldest computers.
#aku "I think WPF can greatly improve user experience."
I believe that WPF has amazing potential as a tool to make UIs more creative and better suited to the actual data that is being displayed, BUT..............
Just the mere act of using WPF isn't going to make great UIs appear out of nowhere.
A great carpenter may use the best wood working tools, but that doesn't mean that if you picked up his tools you'd all of a sudden be popping out fine furniture.
Using WPF over HTML/Flash/WinForms/etc just increases your potential .
If that's potential for ugliness or potential for beauty is up to you.
#David H Aust That's part of the reason for asking the question - with these newer tools like WPF that lend themselves to providing newer, more intricate, and at the same time simpler for the user, interfaces that we might need to adapt to new ways of doing things.
And trying to find out who else is adapting/interested and what they are doing, and where they get some inspiration, knowledge or help :)
IE: This is me being proactive about change in possibly the slackest manner ever, short of actively googling :)
^ That was a joke, to make it clear, I'm actually pretty active about learning new stuff, I'm just finding some of the crowdsourcing stackoverflow vs googling pretty interesting :)
Microsoft is building a DataGrid for WPF. A CTP can be found here.
#Lars Truijens - Thanks, but I think for 99% of cases that's a horrible idea, and sure, there are uses - but I've found that with WPF there's typically a much better way to do it.
Plus you can use textboxes, and use an Enter as Tab override to move through them easily and swiftly.