Are Many ThirdParty WebControls to Heavy?
So what do you think of 3rd party webcontrols, like Infragistics, ComponentOne, Farpoint, etc? We use Infragistics here at PRG, which is certainly a well-written set of controls. The problem is that these things have to be so flexible to appeal to the largest number of customers that they are often way too heavy! I was using their tree-view control (they call it WebNavigator) for a little while to easily display my data with dhtml behavior and it worked fine. All the sudden when I had to add some more dynamic behavior in their client-side javascript I found that it took a couple of seconds or more to update! My solution was to port my own rather simplistic tree-view control that I use on my site and the dynamic behavior is now instantaneous. My code is certainly not as flexible as Infragistics, but it is incredibly fast due to its simplicity. Similarly, while all these web-grids have cool features, they are also just too slow to use in anything but the simplest cases. Their client-side sorting is way too slow for even medium sized resultsets, and once you turn to server-side you have now opened up the whole viewstate issue. Instead, I end up doing custom paging and sorting through a stored procedure that only returns the page of data needed since this performs optimally. But this leaves the grid being just another too-heavy pretty GUI control that really has nothing beyond a simple repeater. So what does everyone else think about these super 3rd party webcontrols that have something for everyone?