ckorthUSAover 2 years ago
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. :-)