Do you know any good WPF control library (even commercial) and what experiences have you made with them?
Telerik has a commercial line of WPF controls, as well as WinForms, and Silverlight. They are very high quality, and on the high end in terms of $$$, but they're worth their weight in gold if you're going to utilize them.
I've used their web products and they are well made. They even have sample code on their site and demos so you can get started easily.
Odyssey is a nice set of controls with a Ribbon menu control and Outlook-style bars.
You may have problems using them in XBAP applications though.
DevExpress have a rich set as well.
Infragistics has some excellent WPF and WinForm controls (commercial). I'll admit I have only used their WinForm controls, but if their WPF controls are anything similar, they will be great.
Related
I would like to use both Telerik WPF UI Controls and WPF own controls in the same project. I think WPF is quite good and I need only a few controls and themes from Telerik. However, when I mix them, not all WPF controls benefit from the themes of Telerik. I read that, Telerik only support a few of WPF controls like TextBox and etc. However, I could not find a way to achieve a WPF Window with a looking like RadWindow. I have been searching and found some answers about this topic, but I think they are a little bit disorganized.
In brief, I would like to use styles from Telerik for also other WPF Controls (non-Telerik ones), but I am not sure whether it is possible or not? When I use WPF Window and RADProgressBar together, of course it does not look very good. If mixing is not a good idea I am considering completely switching to WPF. I do not have much experience with Telerik and I do not want to struggle in a mess due to this mixed environment. I want to use both if it is possible to achieve a unified style for both controls (Telerik and non-Telerik).
Take a look at MahApps Metro (http://mahapps.com/), a WPF control toolkit that has styles to give your application a metro feel, as that is what a lot of the Telerik UI kit does as far as I can tell.
My company is starting a major greenfield development project using DevExpress WPF controls. I just read this critical review of their WPF controls:
[…] DevExpress developers completely misunderstood WPF when they developed their WPF controls. I really cannot impress upon you sufficiently well just how much of a displeasure it is using their controls. I feel absolutely terrible (almost guilty) about talking about a vendor with such negativity, but they have made a serious mistake in their WPF suite, it has been a singular source of the most abject frustration for me in about a decade of developing software.
Do you agree that DevExpress does not understand the WPF paradigm and will cause our developers grief during development and maintenance? Can you suggest an alternate vendor of WPF controls? I'm looking for a vendor with WPF controls that will enhance our application while fitting well with the WPF API, binding and MVVM.
The link (above) to the critical blog post is broken. The original author has stated:
I wrote the original article, and have decided to work with DevExpress in a private capacity after speaking with them so I have regrettably decided to remove the post. Regards, Ira
Abject frustration is EXACTLY what I experienced thanks to DevExpress. I lost hours of my life attempting to simply bind a combo box. The drop-down list at best would only display my ItemsSource class name multiple times. I even posted a StackOverflow question to figure out what I could possibly be doing wrong. Finally on a whim I tried removing this one line of xaml:
devx:ThemeManager.ThemeName="DeepBlue"
Suddenly my problem went away. It was caused by the Developer Express wpf theme DeepBlue. Discovering the problem was a tremendous relief. My company will now be using Telerik WPF controls. My colleagues are quite happy with DevExpress Asp.Net controls. It is only the WPF suite we are avoiding.
I would like to clarify our opinion on usage of our controls in applications built based on the MVVM pattern. At the moment, we are working on a series of examples which should clarify how our controls can be used under different popular MVVM based frameworks (like Prism, MVVM Light and so on). There are a couple of problems in our WPF controls regarding the MVVM pattern and we are trying to eliminate them. However, generally there are no showstoppers that can prevent a developer from using our controls in a MVVM application. Hopefully, our examples, posted on the DevExpress Web Site will convince you in this.
I do not agree completely with the assertion that DevX developers missed the mark on WPF. However, I will say that it appears they may have had a steep learning curve to overcome. Lets face it, WPF is massive. To master it, even out of the box, is a daunting task. I do agree that DevEx controls will not fit into a MVVM pattern, but they do sit quite nicely in a MVP pattern. "Can you suggest an alternate vendor of WPF controls?" No, but I will suggest that you study additional patterns if you are stuck with DevEx.
I have used Syncfusion, Ingragistics, Telerik as well as various smaller libraries and DevExpress is my platform of choice. I find them to be not only super supportive of WPF and MVVM but their tech support has been phenomenal. I actually was mid project in a multi-million dollar project using Syncfusion WPF and found so many bugs in the library that my customer was close to pulling the plug. I switched mid stream to DevEx and they save my bacon. Their controls always seem the most up to date and incorporating the latest trends. I wish they did more Xamarin stuff and some of the other things that Syncfusion does but I would rather have less stuff that actually works than a wide array of stuff that doesn't.
In a WinForms project there are a number of controls such as MenuStrip, OpenFileDialog, SaveFileDialog.
After a quick look, I can't seem to see the equivalents for these controls in the WPF toolbox.
Is there any way to gain access to these or do they exist in another form?
There are a number of different resources you can use for finding the type of control you need.
Have you looked in the WPF Toolkit?
Have you investigated any third party control vendors?
(Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, Infragistics)
Here's an excellent link comparing the WinForms and WPF control equivalents.
You'd probably recieve a more detailed answer if you gave specifics as to which control you're looking for.
you can add a winforms host into the project but which controls are you after as the wpf does have a decent amount of controls and generally does more in the ui department (but pays in speed usually)
we have biuld a complex custom control for WPF.
Now we are going to port our control to Silverlight.
Me and my collaborator, never work with silverlight! :)
Is there some best practice to follow to make a porting activity from WPF to Silverlight?
I find the next post as nice to be read: (2 parts)
Porting from WPF to Silverlight: The Missing Pieces, Part 1
Porting from WPF to Silverlight: The Missing Pieces, Part 2
There are some differences to be aware of, for example there are no Routed Commands in Silverlight. Maybe you want to have a look at those two links:
Contrasting Silverlight and WPF
Guidance on Differences Between WPF and Silverlight
Which technology (WPF or Winforms) should be used if UI supposed to be highly customizable like controls layout/design could be change by user and such sort of UI customization.
Kindly mention best practices along to achieve that...
I just recently developed a designer in both WinForms (company req) and WPF (to see how much better it was). WPF has a definate edge, especially when it comes to nicer looking controls and control transparency.
This was my first actual WPF project, other than just messing around, so I was learning as I went. I found this series on creating a diagram designer very helpful. I didn't really do the same things that this article talks about, but more of a hybrid between that and my WinForms app.
I have to admit that the UI functionality was up and running much faster in the WPF version than with the WinForms version.
WPF I have found the easiest to create controls on a fly. Because I can just attach them as child controls to the parent, and the Grids, Dock Panels, just make life easier.
I found WinForms to be clunky to always work with. However I come from a Web background and Xaml makes sense to me.
WPF controls are design and lookless. That means you have a default view of them, but everything detail of a WPF control can be overridden. It's almost akin to using CSS. In the WPF world, you do not create custom controls like you do in WinForms. The main thing in WPF world is "styling" controls and defining a style for them. It just happens that the style also controls the layout and the form of the controls.
WPF is FAR superior for designing and style of UI. Check out these two top WPF companies and tell me if this stuff is easy to do in WinForms:
Cynergy Systems: http://www.cynergysystems.com/
Thirteen23: http://www.thirteen23.com/