Monday, July 20, 2009

Not Digging Telerik

[Update] Someone from Telerik contacted me willing to help us out with our issue. That says a lot for Telerik and restores a good chunk of my faith in their controls and their support.

I like Telerik. They have produced some very cool controls to use with ASP.Net. Unfortunately the 2009 Q1 release broke all our controls at work. We normally inherit off of the Telerik controls and add some additional functionality. Whatever changes happened under the hood makes the Q1 + releases useless to us.

My job is to figure out a solution. So far no luck. Telerik says they don't support inheritance issues. Wish we would have known that earlier, or at least known to expect that existing working code will not be guaranteed to work in the future as is.

Sucks. Use this as a warning against becoming too dependant on 3rd party controls, as you can and will get burned.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Sorry to hear for your troubles -- I would try to help. We did introduce some breaking changes in Q1 2009 mainly in the CSS. We still support the old skins and have a converter for the new classes though. Send me a message @ ivo[dot]nedkov[at]telerik[dot]com with details on your problems and some code samples if possible. I will do my best to help.

Ivo Nedkov
Unit Manager
Telerik

infocyde said...

Thanks for your offer to help Ivo. I will send some code samples to you with the problems we are facing. Telerik has allowed us add some awesome functionality to our primary web application, I'm just a little bummed about the latest changes. If you can help me fix my issue I would be grateful and my faith in Telerik will be completely restored. You guys have helped us out in the past, I just got brushed off in the forums for this latest issue.

Anonymous said...

Telerik makes a decent CMS, but their controls are bloated, slow and hard to customize in the end. Take your web dev skills to the next level and use jquery. Forget this view-state heavy crap that will destroy page load times, lead to bad SEO and ultimately take full control from the developer. It's worth the time investment!

infocyde said...

Anonymous, while some of the points you bring up are true, Telerik controls have saved us a LOT of time. That time has been invested in other areas relating to our core business and proved very fruitful. I personally would rather go with self developed libraries, but sometimes it doesn't always make sense.