Tuesday, November 16, 2010

A look at some Silverlight control libraries

As I start serious Silverlight development for the first time, I've been looking at and evaluating some of the control libraries out there.

Why? Well, because they contain huge amounts of slick, useful, QA'd functionality which will accelerate my development - so they represent superb *value* for money.

Here are some of my notes so far:
  • Telerik - have a huge set of controls including rich text editing, super framework libraries (like containers and transitions), and lots and lots of charting. I've attended a couple of their webinars and clearly they've got good functionality now, plus lots more coming every quarter.
  • Infragistics - a fairly large set of functionality again including grids, menus and a docking framework
  • Dundas - seems to be mainly focussed on Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards - so lots of charts.
  • Actipro - a much smaller set of functionality focussed around an MsDev like code editor.
So far... I'm tempted to buy Telerik with the intention of using:
- the charting - especially the lovely sparklines :)
- the grid - everyone needs one eventually!
- the overall framework stuff - especially as they use MVVM everywhere.

I will install the trial version soon and then come back with more feedback.

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