Re: Third Party Control Packs

I realize there are some happy customers but I've not been.

Their winform controls controls are very inconsistent in their
implementation such as Text vs. Caption properties and other "standard"
WinForm properties.  Some controls don't even have either when you would
expect them to have such a property.  Instead, they have some completely
different implementation or you must "cast" it to another type to get the
desired type.  It seems to me that DevExpress converted their MFC control
set they sold years ago (and I'm sure still do) into MS.NET and never
bothered to "clean" it up and make it .NET framework appropriate so someone
programming the framework would "know" their objects as the "know" the
framework objects.

When I tried to figure out some of the intricacies of various controls, such
as the super tooltip, I was required to know that the type of object sent in
the event arguments is not the type added, but a type generated by the
control and in order to know the type added, you must in turn examine the
.Item property of the .Item property of the event args.  Nowhere (at least
as much searching as I did) did I find directions or help on this.  When I
tried to use the built in help, it was merely machine generated help with no
"help" contained therein.  Their documentation related specifically to the
SuperTooltip and limited code samples didn't make mention of this issue when
it comes to pro grammatically using BeforeShow event.  Even after
I surpassed that hurdle, I was daunted by the inability to get the tip to do
what I needed to do.  Yes, I had a complex issue for a grid in that I needed
the super tip to move with the mouse and change based on certain cells.  I
never could get it to work.  I spent a couple of days trying to get it to do
what I needed.  Just nothing I did seemed to work.

My colleagues have had similar if not more difficult problems with the
various controls.  Some of them have dealt with the nightmares of the
Reporting tool that "allows" you to customize the reporting tool for your
own custom packaging and report generators.  Yet, there is no documentation
on how one might accomplish this task; when you dig into the "inner sanctum"
of the control you find that changing things such as menu and toolbar
options are not lacking but require so many hoops through which the
programmer must jump that it becomes a case of determining the benefit of
using the control vs. the cost incurred in developing "around" it.

Making posts to DevExpress's help forums produces little if any results.  A
lot of the time, for anything advanced, they either don't understand the
question and state as much or are unwilling to answer with anything other
than "Unable to reproduce."

As peeve on my part, the VB part of the documentation for DevExpress is
wrong in several places.  It looks like someone with a C, C++, C# background
took a stab at converting the existing documentation to VB and missed the
mark.  Sometimes the class declarations are expressed as:

Public Class SomeDevExpressControl : SomeDevExpressBaseControl...

Obviously this is incorrect for VB.

it should be:

Public Class SomeDevExpressControl: Inherits SomeDevExpressBaseControl or
...
Public Class SomeDevExpressControl
    Inherits SomeDevExpressBaseControl
...

I'll admit that for simple tasks DevExpress works quite well and as expected
and their controls do have a good "look and feel" to them; my issue with
them is that for anything complex you run into various roadblocks due to
either their own design flaws or failure to "see" ahead at what people might
try to do with their controls.

I'm both a C# and VB programmer and have been for many, many years with
experience in many other languages and other types of development.  I've
worked with numerous vendor's control sets for both Delphi, VB, and .NET,
some with success and some with a modicum of success.  DevExpress is one of
those latter ones.  I judge a control set's usefulness based on how easy it
is for me to "figure out" their logic and design of the controls.  If I
think I have it and I don't and I can't read up on the issue because there's
nothing to read or if there's so much irrelevant documentation (on how to do
simple tasks) on everything but the subject in which I'm try to learn then
my opinion of the control set drops immensely.

I hope this is sufficient.  I'm glad you've had a good experience with the
controls.
Like I said, not everyone has a bad experience; it depends on what you're
trying to accomplish, i.e., the business problem which you are trying to
overcome.


On 7/17/07, Stoyan Damov <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 7/17/07, Mike Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I've not had much luck with DevExpress controls and their support and
> > documentation is lacking.
> > I've only worked with the WinForm controls though but I've not been
> > satisfied.
> >
>
> I find that EXREMELY hard to believe (re WinForm controls). IMO
> DevEx's documentation is the BEST I have EVER seen - ever. Would you
> care to back your statements?
>
> Cheers,
> Stoyan
>
> P.S. I'm not in anyway affiliated with DX, just a very very happy
> customer.
>
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