itGrid - ActiveX (.NET Ready) - V2.0.3 - Reviews

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Customer Reviews

Average Review:   based on 13 reviews.

Doug Cotterill, DODE Computer Systems (Australia) 24-Mar-2006Review: 

itGrid = DevTimeSaved. It's that simple.

This control is truly a pleasure to use, with a comprehensive suite of examples, covering many possible scenarios. In our evaluations between itGrid and other grids on the market, itGrid won hands down, both in programmability and performance.

The printing capabilities of itGrid have been particularly impressive. In fact, we've been able to replace many of our fiddly, painful to design and work with, grid type reports using itGrid's wide ranging set of print properties and formatting abilities.

itCombo has also replaced the VB combo control throughout our applications. This wee little control addresses everything that has ever annoyed us about the VB version and then some :)

Features like the in cell combos are also used extensively, and with far more ease than in other competitors.

In short, itGrid is one of the most impressive and full featured controls I've seen in a while. The cost of purchasing this product has been covered over and over again in development time and grief saved.

If you're looking for a grid control, it's hard to go past itGrid

Doug Cotterill,
DODE Computer Systems (Australia)

Anonymous 21-Feb-2006Review: 

I am using itGrid in an application built in MS Access. The developer's sales pitch suggest that itGrid is 'easy' to use in MS Access. I have been able to implement it successfully and yes it is fast and allows you a great deal of flexibility in the layout of your grids. However, it is not nearly as straight forward to use as the demo version and other reviews suggest. You should be aware that you need to own VB6 to be able to make use of the demo file (although you can inspect the code using notepad). Without access to the demo files within the VB6 IDE, the help files can be difficult to interpret. The help files contain very little example code. Also, you will find that much of the functionality, such as all the graphic list boxes, is accessible only through making calls to the Windows API. So MS Access developers beware, you can make it work, and it'll give you some impressive functionality, but you may be in for a lot of frustration, although the software's developer helped me out.

Robin Grayson [United Kingdom] 11-Mar-2005Review: 

If you are reading this review because you are thinking of buying itGrid, I have just one thing to say to you - "Buy it!, you will not be disappointed"

I have been using itGrid for two years now, and so far have not come across anything that i have had to work around. The example source code that comes with itGrid is second to none. I have never seen such in depth quality examples before, so much so that as a programmer you can pretty much figure out anything from the help file and the example source code. That's not to say however I have not needed to contact the support team at it-Partners.com because I have, on many occasions. Not because of problems I am pleased to say, but for advice on "how best to do this" with a specific job in mind. Each and every time I have contacted support, I have had my email replied to quickly and with a polite and intelligent reply.

We reviewed several grid components before deciding on itGrid, and from the outset it has always been my favourite, even though I was being pushed by colleagues towards other packages which came bundled with many more components. Luckily I had the deciding vote and I sold it to the others by summing it up very simply ..

- We need a grid component, and we have found an excellent one with itGrid that is easy to use and offers excellent performance
- The examples are of such high quality I am very confident in the quality of the grid itself
- Why buy one of the other "all in one" packages and end up with a lower quality grid component for the sake of a few extra components
- Think of the business needs, rather than the "toys"

I never write reviews, but made an exception here for an exceptional product. I hope it has left you with a positive feeling about itGrid and it-Partners.com - I cannot praise them enough.

Robin Grayson
T&R Software Solutions

jgranzow [Australia] 17-Aug-2004Review: 

I am an IT Manager for a large Transport Company. We have used IT Grid in our systems installed at customer premises. With over 4,000 installations, IT Grid has provided us with the competitive edge to perform quicker than any other despatch program in the Market. Congradulation to Brett Werner for developing a product that can make a difference. Thanks

mikedonnerstag [United Kingdom] 07-Jul-2004Review: 

I am a developer who writes large database applications in Visual Basic. I had been looking for a grid control around which I could construct a custom 'wrapper' that set up and populated both read-only and editable grids of information from data held in database tables. In this way, everything about how the grid appears in an application can be modified 'on-the-fly' from the application front-end (obviating re-compilation, re-deployment, etc.) The wrapper includes complex input validation, with colour-coded notification of input errors.

I tested many of the best grid controls on the market and found that the itGrid was a no-nonsense product that included all of the functionality I needed. Having extensively developed using itgrid for over a year I can confirm that it is a very fast and robust grid control. I can also confirm that the support of the product is second to none.

Michael Pilley, Director IT, Third-Millennium Mana 11-Mar-2004Review: 

First of all - congratulations on an absolutely awesome product. itGrid is without a doubt the most impressive grid on the market (and we have benchmarked all the major contenders to prove this). In fact it's got to be one of the most impressive "controls" ever built in my humble opinion - it has not only restored my faith in Grids per se - but frankly it has restored my faith in VB to boot (still can't believe itGrid was written in VB!).

As far as the performance and suitability testing we did - it took us a month and we tested GridEx, True DBGrid, Objective Grid (the grid we used in our first version), the various MS grids and a host of other lessor known grids. Indeed, I don't think there are many grids we did not look at. We did most of this testing without even knowing about your product, but when we came across it, it blew our benchmarks out of the water. Initially we couldn't believe it - especially the volume related metrics we had benchmarked.

In all areas, we found itGrid equalled or exceeded the other grids. It was without a doubt the standout grid product. The decision to run with itGrid on the basis of our testing was an easy one.

Two weeks of solid testing with itGrid led us to the conclusion that, firstly, its online help and support documentation is excellent and secondly that it is less buggy than both GridEx and TrueDB. Furthermore, the visual outputs that itGrid is capable of were easy to implement and compared favourably to or exceeded that of other grid products. Furthermore, it has a road map that will see it taken to .Net.

Far and away the most impressive thing about itGrid, though, is that it is a sheer pleasure to work with. There is none of the "grid-hell" that accompanies so many other pretenders in this field. We are so impressed with this product that it is now not only our only grid, but we also use it whenever we need a Treeview or Listview, and of course we always use itCombo if we need a combo.

In a nutshell, itGrid out performed everything in nearly all categories. It is ridiculously fast, future-proof, extremely robust (indeed it is more robust than some other grids which have been on the market for years longer that itGrid) and its the easiest grid to develop with by a country-mile.

If you're like me and have despaired in the past over "grid-hell" and "grid-workarounds"- then do yourself a huge favour and give itGrid a spin.

B. Riis, Programmer, Denmark 02-Feb-2004Review: 

I was looking for a new grid for an application I was working on. I had a couple of demands for that grid: it should be FAST; have a roadmap for the
future; have support that was more than a News Group; be easy to learn and well documented, with good samples.

I tested a lot of the grids on the market, but the only one that lived up to all of the above demand was itGrid from it-partners.com. I was amazed
with the speed this grid has. (Loading the same table containing 75.000 records is about 10 times as fast with itGrid compared to my current grid.)

One thing that programmers normally don’t like is writing good documentation, but here itGrid is different too. The Help file is excellent with
some of the samples integrated into it, but besides from that there are so many samples supplied that I found it impossible to find a scenario I could
not find an example of. And for the few times I got stuck, there was a superb support from it-partners.com. If I asked a question, I did not only
get a short answer, I got a complete example on how to implement the solution, and I got it FAST.

Almost everyday I am amazed by some of the features I find in itGrid, this is definitely a grid I will recommend to every programmer who needs a
grid and has the same basic demands I have.

Brett Werner, Managing Director, it-partners.com 12-Jan-2004Review: 

RE: itGrid 2 star review

itGrid caches data as opposed to fetching on demand. In your situation where itGrid would be required to load 1 million records, there will be a load delay. However the majority of this delay will be fetching that many records across your network. itGrid can load hundreds of thousands of client side records in a fraction of a second. It cannot, however, boost network performance!

The benefit of caching is that performance after loading is exceptional, especially for tasks such as sorting and grouping which require access to a lot of data. A couple of points of interest:

1. A grid is a UI component. It is hard to imagine users being able to comprehend and do anything with 1 million records. A much better solution is to fetch smaller quantities of records as required.

2. Smaller quantities of data can be safely fetched using client side recordsets. This reduces server memory requirements (very important when you have many users) and takes advantage of often under-utilised client memory. Fetching records once also reduces overall network traffic.

Regards,

Brett Werner
Managing Director
it-partners.com

brainmuscle [USA] 17-Dec-2003Review: 

All developers who gave this grid tool a five star rating either work the company or it is the only third party grid control they have ever tried.

I am normally too lazy to write reviews, but after testing this product because of need to update grid controls for the applications I maintain for my company, I could not avoid voicing out my dissapointment.

It is a bold statement too say:

"itGrid can load, sort, sub-total and display thousands of data records in a fraction of a second.
...Unlike other grid products, itGrid focuses solely on performance and the end-user experience."

This product doesn't deliver, at least for me, I deal with tables with 1,000,000 records. I will agree that most grid tools are mostly fancy, but I guess a big part of my dissapointment comes from testing the "XpressQuantumGrid". The "XpressQuantumGrid" delivers performance, is fancy, costs 75% less, has more examples, help file is amazing, and they can back up the above statement.
Developers out there, compare the two and you will see what I am talking about.

The ITGrid loads all the records from the DB in local memory even when using a serverside cursor and setting the cachesize correctly.

Ian

Laetitia SERRE 21-Jul-2003Review: 

Analyste programmeur au sein d’une petite société de service, j’ai découvert le contrôle itgrid par hasard, sur le net. Ce contrôle correspondait à mes critères de recherche et je n’ai pas été déçue en l’intégrant dans mon projet VB. C’est un outil maniable, rapide et évolutif !

Mais ce que j’ai le plus apprécié, ce n’est pas le site internet de it-partners.com avec son nouvel accueil client qui permet de télécharger la dernière version du produit en un clin d’oeil
mais l’aide au développement que j’ai reçu de la part de l’équipe du support technique.
Brett Werner a toujours répondu très rapidement à mes questions, avec beaucoup de précision et un réel souci de cerner mes véritables besoins (ce qui n’est pas toujours évident quand on communique avec une personne étrangère !).

Extrêmement satisfaite par les services d’it-partners, je tenais à écrire ces quelques mots.


[Translation]

I am an Analyst programmer within a small service company, I discovered itGrid on the Web. This control met my search requirements and I wasn't disappointed when I added it to my VB project. It's an easy to use, fast, evolutionary tool!

The it-partners.com Web site lets you download the latest updates of itGrid quickly and their technical support team was very helpful. My queries were always answered promptly and with accuracy. They really tried to understand my issues even though there was a language barrier.

I am extremely satisfied with it-partners.com services and because of these reasons I took the time to write this review.

mgoodspeed [USA] 17-Jul-2003Review: 

I think it-partners.com have hit a home run with this component. Just the right feature set, fast and lightweight. I've tried other grid components and found them wanting -- too buggy, too slow, too limited or too bloated, too expensive.

I downloaded the demo version at 3:00 PM on a Friday night, and started experimenting with it. By the time I looked up, it was 5:30 AM! This control is that cool.

itGrid is the perfect interface for our finance people, as it is configurable to look and act just like a spreadsheet -- and they are all spreadsheet jocks. (Database bad, hard -- spreadsheet good, easy). Many thanks to it-partners.com for their support. It reminded me of why I became a programmer in the first place -- because it's fun!

stevej [USA] 15-Jul-2003Review: 

I really like the way itGrid works! It makes a lot more sense to me than MS FlexGrid et al. I've also found other grids to be slow and buggy. Virtually everything I wanted to do with the other grids required a strange workaround and wasted time debugging strange control behavior. itGrid had the features and performance I was searching for.

While itGrid doesn't currently provide individually resizeable row heights (which was originally required by my project's design), the authors were very helpful in providing several possible solutions, one of which satisfied the needs of the end-users.

Tech support was quick, responsive, direct, and very helpful--and all of this was while I was still using the free trial version of the program.

I also really like the included itCombo control as I've been fighting against MS DataCombo and losing. I was able to get a nice looking, well-behaving combo working in minutes vs. hours trying to get DataCombo to work the way the user expects.

Anyone needing a grid control should consider itGrid.

Mike Gunderloy, Contributing Editor, MCP Magazine. 16-Jun-2003Review: 

Even though there's a lot of .NET news these days (as you've surely
noticed in Developer Central!) there is plenty of development going on
with previous versions of software as well. In particular, VB 6.0
remains a perfectly viable platform for many applications. If you're
working in VB 6.0, and in need of a grid control, itGrid is a
lesser-known alternative that's pretty impressive.

I tried out the most recent release, and I was impressed with both the
speed of the control and its flexibility. Loading, sorting, searching
all happen very quickly on my test box; this grid is clearly a
performer. For flexibility, here are a few cute examples from their
sample application:

- "Minesweeper" implemented as a clickable grid
- XML loading into a hierarchical display
- Owner-draw bar graphs
- Fine control over everything from grid styles to tab behavior
- Grids that look (and behave) like property sheets

The control doesn't have any dependencies beyond the VB 6.0
infrastructure, so it won't add much to your distribution footprint. The
price gets you a redistribution license for applications you build
(though not, of course, for the design-time license). In addition to
VB6, it also works in recent versions of Access, and is safe for
scripting and initialization and signed for use in IE (among other
things, this allows them to put live samples in their HTML help file --
a nice touch).

You can download a 14-day sample from the company's Web site, or see a
bunch of screenshots that may provoke you to download. You can use this
version in .NET via COM Interop, but they say there's a native .NET
version planned for the future as well.