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General Comments on 2008v1??
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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.

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    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 Lockridge
    Sr. Programmer
    SmithSystems, Inc.
    Los Angeles, CA

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