There is a great deal...

habramsUSA5 star
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.