DXperience DXv2 - Reviews

Overview | Pricing & Licensing | Evals & Downloads | Compatibility | Publisher Details | Reviews | Support Forum | Summary

Customer Reviews

Average Review:  based on 15 reviews.

preetham_reddyc [AZ, USA] 13-Jan-2011Review: 

Take my word... DXperience Suite is one of the best ASP.NET Suite of controls I've ever worked with... Hands down... No Competition...

I have been using DevExpress controls over the past few months and am pleasantly surprised with the quality of their controls...

I love XPO and XAF... I played with lot of ORM frameworks before XPO. Although most of them have their advantages, XPO is very simple to learn, has excellent documentation and has fantastic support from CodeRush.... If you master code rush short cut keys for XPO, developing data driven application will be a breeze... It's very intuitive and supports DDD.

If you want to develop business applications, XAF can cut down development time by 80%... Seriously, try it. You will never look back.

The soon to be released Domain Component Technology (In BETA now) for XAF and pure XPO will be invaluable to developers... I started playing with it and loving every bit of it...

heabrams [GA, USA] 03-Dec-2010Review: 

I have now been using DXexperience for several months. I remain astounded at the amount of effort the publisher has put into this product, and despite the significant cost it still seems to me an exceptional buy. E-mail help continues to be superb, and the improved (if sometimes overly-complex) controls work brilliantly. The company provides periodic videos explaining the underlying programming philosophy, and these videos are useful (not so much for the product itself but rather as general programming advice). The rtf text box with spell checker works nicely and they together are worth half the price of the entire set. Install dependencies are well set out, easing the effort of crafting an installer for your project. Despite the considerable time needed to understand how the components works, DXexperience is really an exceptional product. I have changed my rating to 5 stars.

tim [United Kingdom] 07-Dec-2009Review: 

Great suite of controls - used for several years now, But the help and support so severely lacking its almost useless. I use CSLA.NET so binding to ILists is important for me and most of the examples bind to a dataset (who uses datasets in serious application development anyway). Hours and hours of searching through KB articles and forums are sometimes required to find information and then you give up and spend hours and hours using test harnesses. You cannot seem to be able to control databinding in anyway. Why can't dev express have an attribute that can be applied to prevent binding on a given property (they may already have it but the help and support is so poor I've never been able to find it). The help and examples stop short at anything more than a simple desktop application - anything involving N-Tiers and your on your own, Must be a serious market for a decent book to be written on this suite. In summation any product is only as good as its help and support so I can only give three stars - a shame for an otherwise excellent product.

Johnson_Forrest [USA] 07-May-2009Review: 

Our small company decided to go with DevExpress because of their reputation and solid products, and I must say am I glad we did. We initially only needed a few components in their suite, but as our requirements changed and we needed more, it was sure nice to be able to get matching components without having to go to another company. They have it all!
Also, I've felt the documentation to be fair for the components we've used. There online support system is top notch too. Questions are usually addressed within a day.

sistemassagam [Colombia] 28-Apr-2009Review: 

Developer Express has the best .NET components. In my opinion their products are the best on the market. The ease of development in design time is amazing!

brandnewx [Cambodia] 11-Jul-2008Review: 

DXPerience for Winforms is just awesome! It contains a shipload of pretty-looking professional controls that has tons and tons of features. The layout controls save me hours manual aligning, resizing and positioning of controls. Now the controls just snap right in the way they should be with much less effort. The grid controls have all capabilities you can imagine: Master-detail relationship, pivot, sorting, filtering, advance filtering, grouping, data validation, formatting rule, layout backup/restoration, inline editor, linq support, and many more. The grids support several innovative view modes including the standard grid view, banded grid view, card view and layout view. In addition to layout and grid controls, DXPerience has almost all the editor controls in the world: text, rich text, number, percentage, mask, font, color, etc. Now my users can enter data in many forms that you like. Have I talked about the printing system and reporting? This is the best part. The printing system is so robust that it can instantly print WinForm controls and DXperience controls in addition to the DXperience's report format. It is so full-featured that I print anything I want whether it's formatted text, table, image, barcode or .NET controls, yet it's surprisingly easy to use.

ckorth [USA] 24-Apr-2008Review: 

I have been using the win form controls for many years and could not live without them. The grid is great and I use most of the other win controls exclusively on all my projects. For the winforms controls I would give it 5 stars and have always recommended the package to other developers

On the other hand I would rank the other aspects of the DXExperience as follows
DXexperience - 10 stars. Great product!
ASPexperience - 1 star. Simply atrocious and cannot keep VS2008 running when adding their controls to any form with a master page. Only control I found stable was the menu.
CodeRush - 3 stars. Worked great until VS2008. Now causes VS2008 to become sluggish. Also cannot seem to turn it on and off on the fly. Had to uninstall
RefactorPro - 3 stars. Same problem as CodeRush
xPressApp - 0 stars. Couldn't figure out what to use it for. Lacking sufficient documentation and ideas

All of my criticisms regarding this product probably stem for one significant fact about developer express. No matter how good your product is, if you can't adequately explain how to use it in your documentation, then you may as well hang it up. They have a long tradition of having the absolute worse documentation I have ever seen in a product that basically costs over a thousand dollars and then hundreds each year for the subscription renewal.
I applaud them for their frequent updates to their controls, but they need a complete overhaul of their documentation.
Some real world concepts would be great.

So with all these complaints why do I renew each year? (have been using the grid since it was a standalone in 2002)
Because the winform capabilites are so superior to anything else out there so it justifies the cost. And each year I send them an email complaining about their documentation along with my renewal. :-)

Abdurahman [Saudi Arabia] 01-May-2007Review: 

I have spent about 6 months searching and testing many components. but, I did not find what I can say is as perfect, complete or fast a solution as Devexpress. Just one thing I dislike is that they don't support right to left RTL.

habrams [USA] 28-Jul-2010Review: 

There is a great deal to like about this product. In particular, the developers have not been shy about adding specialized editors and dialogs to make customization friendly. The company provides very high quality video lessons to demonstrate the use of the various components. Attention to detail shows in every aspect of the product.

However, there are two problems that will cause you to pull out your hair. First, the written documention (in pdf format) runs to more than 3,000 pages, and documentation that is too long (like documentation that is too short) is essentially worthless. The chm help file is much better because the hyperlinks, contents, and index make is useable. Second, the improved verions of the standard windows components are not derived from the standard versions. If they were, then they would be drop-in replacements offering extensions that could be used when desired. Instead, you must learn a new api, new (and incompatible) variable types, and sometimes very different underlying philosophies to use the improved (i.e., better but very different) components. By starting from scratch rather than using derived classes, the developers have lost much of the benefit object-oriented modern languages provide and they waste my (and your) human capital. For a product that is otherwise so complete and well thought out, this is to my mind a remarkable blunder at the highest level.

There are in addition a few minor quibbles such as the failure to provde a standard menu bar, hiding glyphs in deeply nested folders, and the occasional misnaming of properties (such as "show columns" actually means show column headers). Still, and despite my misgivings, a remarkable product worth the significant cash investment despite demanding too much investment of time.

E-mail technical support is very good. Almost all documentation includes examples in both c# and visual basic.

Anonymous 16-Mar-2007Review: 

I was initially flabbergasted at the massive quantity of controls included in the package and was very excited to begin using them in my Windows Forms and ASP.NET projects. However, once I had made my purchase and installed the product, I found myself struggling to figure out exactly how all these flashy gadgets worked. The Helpfile was all but useless as it lacked all but the most rudimentary examples for only a handful of the controls. The rest was dry, auto-generated help content that is completely useless. As another poster noted, their forum support is a bit slow and many times is as useless as the help file. Unless you're an absolute expert in .Net, you'd probably be better off starting with some other control suite.

h.kammerer [Germany] 30-Aug-2006Review: 

DevExpress liefert die beste Komponentensammlung für Win-Forms. Bis auf wenige fehlende Funktionen (und natürlich ein paar Bugs) ist die Sammlung vollständig, die Hilfe verständlich und ausführlich. Es sind viele Beispiele vorhanden, durch die man die vielen Einsatzmöglichkeiten dargestellt bekommt. Auch der Support und die Newsgroups sind hilfreich, die Antworten von DevExpress oder anderen Benutzern kommen (oft, aber nicht immer) schnell.

Vor allem wenn man die Sammlung mit Konkurrenzprodukten vergleicht, kommt kein anderer Hersteller auch nur annähernd an diese Qualität heran. Einzig die ASP.NET-Komponenten sind noch nicht komplett. Die wichtigsten GUI-Elemente (Grid und allgemeine Editoren) sind noch nicht auf das neue Konzept umgesetzt und die alte Grid-Komponente ist nicht besonders gut. Aber ich bin sicher, das die nächste Version auch ein Hammer sein wird. Bis jetzt hat es DevExpress immer geschafft, ca. im 4 Wochen-Rythmus ein kleines Update zu bringen, 3-4 Mal im Jahr gibt es ein großes Update mit neuen Funktionen.

Viel Spaß damit,
Holger

English translation from above...
DevExpress delivers the best collection for Winform components. Apart from a few missing functions (and naturally a few bugs) the collection is complete, the documentation clear and detailed. It contains many examples, which show you the many ways it can be used. The support and newsgroups are helpful as well, with (mostly, but not always) fast replies from DevExpress or other users.

Especially when comparing the collection with competing products, no other manufacturer comes anywhere close to this quality. Only the ASP.NET components are not complete yet. The most important GUI elements (Grid and general editors) have not been converted to the new concept yet and the old Grid component is not particularly good. But I am sure that the next version will also be excellent. Up until now DevExpress has always managed to release a small update in an approx. 4 week cycle, as well as large updates with new features 3-4 times a year.

Have fun with it,
Holger

steve.sharkey [United Kingdom] 14-Jun-2006Review: 

I've given this full stars now - with the proviso that I'm still waiting on better help but felt I should give an update on the support side of things.

It appears to have been a little hiccup I was suffering from because I've since had nothing but excellent fast responsive support from their support staff.

Steve Sharkey
Technical Director
FirmVisual Ltd

steve.sharkey [United Kingdom] 11-May-2006Review: 

I'd really like to give it 5 stars and can probably upgrade it to 5 stars with just a little extra attention...

So what's good?

The components themselves are very nice to use and there appears to be plenty of depth behind them too. I was looking at upgrading our current suite of components but for 90% of our projects the DevExpress Professional .NET suite has it all - and at a fraction of the cost of upgrading to the latest versions of our existing suites (Crystal reports, Infragistics, Steema Graphs, contour cube). Like I say this suite may not have the absolute power as some of those in their chosen field but for 90% of our requirements they provide it all.

And what lets it down?

I'm afraid like many components these days their help files are somewhat lacking. There is hope however as the coverage appears to be based on the age of the components so with the passage of time the newer components help files may get updated and improved (specifically: XtraLayoutControl suite and XtraCharts). There appears to be a worrying trend towards what appears like automatically generated helpfiles that give volume at the expense of helpful content. Where detailed technical help is provided there is no contextual sample code. And providing a sample application is not really sufficient because I have rarely seen a realistic sample app that does things the way a production application would. The main omissions here I feel is the getting started type tutorial and the task based help. Having said that as I suggested before this appears to be something they have in common with many other component suppliers (I was very disappointed at the .NET help for Contour Cube having been an enthusiastic supporter of their excellent ocx version and also of the dramatic reduction in quality of help that comes with the Infragistics suite.)

And finally....

They really aren't very responsive when it comes to emails. On average emails have taken 48 hours to be responded to which in the fast paced development cycle we work in is very limiting. Having finally ordered the product yesterday I find I can't yet install the purchased product because I have not yet received my registration details from ComponentSource.

Steve Sharkey
Technical Director
FirmVisual Ltd

lbGURU [USA] 15-Mar-2006Review: 

I have had a great experience with this company. The components are of great quality and the support is excellent. I wish they could get someone dedicated on the weekend or some live chat support, but you cannot complain. The support you do get is timely and very in depth with even sample projects sometimes.

sunitjoshi [USA] 23-Feb-2005Review: 

I have played with XtraGrid, XtraPrinting & XtrReports so far and the impression so far has been pretty good. Their support is also fair and responds quickly.