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.

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.

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.

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

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