What are the general thoughts on the 2008v1 release so far? We have just started to use it and don't really see much new or improved. Are there any massive improvements?
Right now we are tryign to decide to renew our subscription or move on to another suite such as Telerik.
The Infragisitcs controsl have been ok and we have usedthem for years but overall they are very heavy for web use and more complex than they need to be. Support and sample code is also weak in our view.
With all due respect to the requirements for maintaining complex software, I'd have to say that one of our primary observations about Infragistics products is that the steak has frequently fallen short of the sizzle. Our Senior Engineer with 25+ years of programming experience on the 80X processor family remarks frequently that Infragistics should spend about half the time they spend on their web presence and sales efforts on the development of the product. When our techs finally decipher the toolset, it's easy to achieve impressive results, but we often wonder whether we may have been able to do something similar in a comparable amount of time without the 3rd party tool. Under circumstances like this, payout begins only with the second or third project accomplished with the tool, and only then when it's done by the same technician.
Your observation that the 2008v1 product seems not to hold much substantial change over past releases is one that I've, personally, made with prior releases. The ever-present critique that it seems all-too-apparent that nobody on the design team ever revisits documentation with an eye toward continuous improvement seems so hackneyed that it now seems a foregone conclusion that mentioning it will do absolutely no good whatsoever.
Here's a workflow statistic: When we put new technicians to work with infragistics tools, IN EXCESS of 73% of their tool time is spent viewing the help documentation. By comparision, when we receive new MS releases (for instance our recent adoption of .NET 3.5 or VS2008) new technicians spend about 18% of their tool time in help systems. We're now several generations into the ASP.NET product line from Infragistics and still don't have context-sensitive help (or even easily-searchable help, for that matter.) This type of documentation is fine for in-house solutions where the majority of help documentation viewers are already familiar with API and technique, but it's woefully inadequate for efficient production use.
Infragistics pushes hard for developers to adopt annual subscriptions to their packages, but after our first experience with it, we quickly decided that it would be highly undesirable to pay far more than we pay for a tool like VS2008 Professional Edition for a toolset that lacks the polish and attention to detail that IG should be backpushing with every release. Someone at IG might invest some well-spent time reviewing how to detail existing offerings during a development cycle rather than adding new features with weak appeal and heavy potential for regression.
That's my .02 worth, this is our 5th year using IG products, and our second annual release purchase.
Jason LockridgeSr. ProgrammerSmithSystems, Inc.Los Angeles, CA
I have to agree that the learning curve for Infragistics controls can be fairly steep. I have been using IG controls for Win and WebForms for some years, and have a fair understanding of the controls I use. Learning any new controls can be somewhat daunting, and can consume large amounts of development time.
I also use controls from other supliers, and have found the experience to be fairly similar.
The easiest way a developer can learn a control is to see it in action. OK, I know IG has examples etc, but these tend to show many controls being used simultaneously and only cover perhaps a single aspect of the control a developer may be interested in.
A much better way would be to have many simple examples in a library. On release of a control, IG could produce a few examples of the control being used. Then when a developer runs into trouble trying to use the control, either IG or a forum contributer could provide a solution example. In this way a shared libary of simple examples could be quickly assembled, providing both old and new developers with an easier learning curve.
So, what about it IG ? Would you create a contributable library in these forums ?
Alex Samson
IT Consultant
My perspective is that of a developer of a WinForms workflow automation application being continually upgraded by a small team for internal use of a small company. In my opinion, Infragistics has more than enough features, and what it needs now is to make what it has already produced work right, and greatly improve the documentation. I say this as someone who has spent hundreds of hours searching thru Infragistics documentation.
The comments about learning curves in the recent posts are right on the mark. The samples are invaluable – we just need a more comprehensive set, and better tie-ins with the documentation. Seeing the same sample code repeated in five or ten places in the documentation is not helpful.
For me, the saving grace has been that I can get answers overnight in many cases from MikeS, and occasionally from other IG people, in this forum. Sort of a human F1 key. Unfortunately, MikeS isn’t answering questions about the Infragistics.Documents engine. In fact, about a third of all posts in the Infragistics.Documents forum are not being answered.
When we encounter a problem with the product, not the documentation, then we are in trouble, because then we have to deal with developer support. These guys are clearly being paid by the number of issues they can close, and not by quality.
When we evaluated WinForms component packages 2 years ago, we communicated with Customer Support to ask whether various features we wanted were implemented. Of all the features, Infragistics supported basically everything except for a document export and printing capability. Now, we have it (as of 2007 v3 I think). This is a great step forward.
I started with the Developer’s Guide > The Toolset > Code Libraries > Infragistics Document Engine section in Help. Here are some roadblocks I found –
I list this not as a list of specific things to be fixed, but rather as symptoms that Infragistics needs much higher quality documentation and support. The Infragistics WinForms product itself is excellent, although more emphasis is needed on fixing bugs in a timely way.