I have the pleasure of being the lead developer in a ramp up of some new software we’re building. I have other experienced devs with me but none of them are experienced in Microsoft’s MVC and we have time to ramp them up while exploring MVC and available options for navigation, controls and other front end components that will be important and we don’t want to waste time on later. One of my devs is specifically working on a layout with a specific navigation criteria. We own Infragistics controls and are open to anything that gets the job smoothly so we tried both sets of MVC extensions.
Infragistics controls install via an installer. I’ve used their Silverlight controls for some existing applications and they worked great. Their MVC controls look very nice in the demos(although no menu control) but we tried them first to see what they had to offer. My developer had a seriously hard time getting the demo grid to work in his existing MVC application due to resource and path issues.
Telerik offers a larger variety of MVC controls. Infrigistic offers some of the same controls and some that Telerik doesn’t but we found that Telerik had a more complete suite for what’s important. Additionally the amount of time for our developer to get started using the controls was dramatically less. In fact when I suggested he use the controls it took him about an hour to get it working within the demo whereas he spent about a day fighting with Infragistics.
Based on our one day assessment I have leaned towards suggesting we purchase Telerik in addition to our existing Infragistics components. It’s been a smoother experience, my other lead developer is an Telerik fan and in my experience at Tech Ed and other Microsoft events Telerik gets more love. It’s an added bonus I don’t have to take heat for the original Infragistic purchase since the guy responsible for that isn’t any longer here.
I’ll post back with an update if my mind changes.
