Kendo UI

[Dan Colasanti]

On the positive side, they are starting to have more info online about the controls, recently open-sourced them, and are having a webinar on Kendo UI on May 7th at 11am ET - you can register for it here: http://www.telerik.com/campaigns/kendo-ui-build-free

[Dave Kreskowiak]

Yeah, I'm using it right now. The documentation and examples absolutely SUCK. MSDN is FAR better than this stuff. The controls are nice if you only use them in standard ways. If you start to customize what you want to do in any way at all, well, I hope your Google-Fu and experimentation skills are 3rd degree black belt or better.

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Dave Kreskowiak

[CarelAgain]

Without going over other comments, we use it in a best of its class type of product so yes, it is good :)

[Ravi Bhavnani]

Dave Kreskowiak wrote:

The controls are nice if you only use them in standard ways.

That was my experience too. /ravi

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[Andy Brummer]

Everything Telerik is banned from my office. If they are transferable we have some Telerik points we can send your way. We earned them by finding valid bugs that they refused to fix. But, no I've no experience with Kendo UI, and I hope I never do. Personally, I don't blame the company too much, I just think that any control library that tries to be a super configurable jacknife is just going to be full of bugs and conflicting edge cases no matter the quality of the team that is forced to build it.

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[Buh Buh]

Kendo has MVC extensions which can generate JavaScript for you. However, I found that some of the JavaScript generated was invalid, making these extensions unusable. In the end we gave up on them and just wrote the JavaScript ourselves. Even then we had to find work-arounds for several bugs.

[Lost User]

Can't recommend it enough. Their grid / model binding for mvc is probably worth 5 times what they charge for it...

[Jeremy Hutchinson]

I think the key with control packages is that you need to accept some of their default behaviors as your standard. As someone stated earlier, most control packages work great as long as you stay in their sweet spot, once you leave the sweet spot it's hit or miss. That being said, we're using the free stuff (all javascript, not the server side controls that emit javascript) in our big MVC project and haven't run into any major problems. We've been able to easily wrap/extend a couple of controls to do some of the common stuff we were writing repeatedly. The free version is worth every penny.

[John Crumpton]

I do use the Kendo MVC products. Like several people have already said, their documentation is sparse and their examples are either too simple or cluttered with a lot of stuff that isn't relevant to what they are trying to show. Forum support is also less than stellar. They seem to devote their dev money to adding new features rather than improving the existing ones. Having said that, I've worked with other products too... they all seem to have shortcomings somewhere. We have a substantial investment w/ Telerik and must maintain licensing to support older projects... so I keep working w/ Kendo on new projects too. Someone else already said all of these control suites seem to be pretty good, as long as you stay within their box... if you're not already committed to Kendo, then I would look at others and use whatever is closest to what you need... the more you try to alter functionality, the more problematic it will get.

[C Wells]

We stopped using Telerik years ago. We contacted tech support about a bug and were informed that even though they could see the problem, we were the only ones to ever complain so they had to intention of fixing it.

[Member 10346655]

Their documentation does suck - mainly because of the poor format they publish it in online (a single page with no proper index/TOC) but the framework and controls are pretty neat; I can't say we've had more stupid bugs than in any other control/web ui framework and at no point have we had anything that couldn't be worked around with a bit of manual labour :) Customization can be tricky at first because the framework is somewhat complex, but once you get your head into their way of doing things, it's really not too hard. We use the grid control extensively and have done some crazy things with it, once we "got" the concepts it really isn't hard. But I wouldn't bother with the MVC helpers personally - they save time in the short-term but will cost you long-term if you need to customise, they are super opinionated and very hard to modify their generated markup/script. Also personally I found their support pretty good once you have a paid subscription. The free support options aren't great (read-only forums, stack overflow, etc) but YMMV. Hope that helps.