Progress Telerik seems to be more focused on pursuing technology we’re not using, and There haven’t been major upgrades to the Windows Forms and ASP.NET controls that we use in our legacy apps.
The tools are great and we use them extensively, even in newer upgrades to our legacy apps.
But we haven’t seen a whole lot of improvements where we’d like to see them, so it’s not worth the maintenance cost.
On the Windows Forms side, we spend a lot of time navigating through the multi-layer structures of the tools, a set-wide consistent change that was implemented over 5 years ago. It’s good for consistency, but makes certain properties and events unintuitive. (E.g., “Why won’t this drop down list work handle the ENTER key being pressed?” “Well, that’s actually the enter event in the embedded control.”)
Our biggest usage on Windows Forms tools are RadButton, RadPageView, RadToggleButton, RadTextBox, and RadSpinEditor – and THAT’S IT.
And they are fairly stable and unchanged in the Progress Telerik line.
On the ASP.NET/AJAX side, it’s frustrating not to have things like cascading drop boxes without getting into a whole lot of Javascript and AJAX coding… which sort of defeats the point of buying a product that proposes to do all that for you. That’s been the only thing we hoped to see updated, some kind of way to preload multiple combos and have it auto-filter based on linked selections, and it never happened.
Our biggest usage on ASP.NET/AJAX tools are RadComboBox, RadDatePicker, RadEditor and RadSpell – and THAT’S IT.
These are also fairly stable and have been mostly unchanged in the Progress Telerik line.
Progress Telerik is rightfully focused on more emerging technologies – we don’t fault the company for that – but most of our work is legacy software we built 10-20 years ago and still maintain, or new clients wanting similar products (so it makes financial sense to use the legacy platform as a basis). If we had an unlimited budget and R&D time, we’d LOVE to explore all the newer technologies and platforms… but it’s just not compatible with our business model (which serves small and mid-range companies with VERY tight budgets).
That makes it hard to justify the thousand or multi-hundred dollar maintenance fee to get periodic patches, when the existing versions are stable and working just fine for us.
If seems like Progress Telerik almost treats these tools as legacy products, and that it’s really not focused on them as much. (Again, we understand, that makes sense.)
