If you visit the sites of the major ASP.NET component vendors, you'll discover many claims about the richness, flexibility, ease-of-use, attractive design, and so on.
However, when it comes to a datagrid and large datasets, eye-candy isn't enough. Web developers want to know about the speed and efficiency of the control. Will it bog down under big loads?
Some vendors make bold claims about their grids. Specifically, Developer Express says "when exploiting the new capabilities of ASPxGridView along with our dataset providers, nothing can match the speed and memory footprint of the ASPxGridView".
Did Developer Express say "nothing" can match its product? Well, Jimmy Petrus of Intersoft Solutions is openly challenging the Developer Express speed claim. In his blog, Petrus says his "apple to apple" test shows that Intersoft's WebGrid.NET Enterprise 6.0 is faster and uses less memory.
ComponentArt doesn't get into the hard numbers game with its grid. It just states that "ComponentArt Grid offers the lightest page footprint and fastest performance in the industry."
Likewise, Telerik makes a vague claim that "Telerik RadGrid is the fastest client-rich Datagrid for ASP.NET."
Infragistics doesn't claim to have the fastest grid. The features page for NetAdvantage WebGrid emphasizes style and richness over speed. However, it says the use of XML and XSLT "allows the WebGrid to render a nearly-unlimited number of rows without performance degradation."
As far as I can tell, ComponentOne doesn't make speed claims for its C1WebGrid component. It sticks with safer terms such as "lightweight" and "small footprint".
As a reviewer for Visual Studio Magazine, I've toyed with the idea of developing an online "ASP.NET drag race" for independent, side-by-side comparisons. Unfortunately, conducting a fair, scientific, verifiable, Consumer Reports-style review is beyond my expertise and bandwidth.
A rating review would be a huge undertaking and guaranteed to generate more heat than light because each vendor would want the tests tweaked to take advantage of their product's strong points. Do you measure real performance or perceived performance? The latter is quite subjective but very valuable to end-users. The free ASP.NET UpdatePanel increases perceived performance even when adding overhead.
I wondered whether the Component Vendor Consortium would like to take on a speed test review of this type. However the CVC seems to have disappeared. Its URL has "gone to squatter".