Free components for .NET developers

[ViperGTI]

I know there are a couple of developers on here so I thought I'd share this. Was visiting one of our component providers and noticed that they followed Microsoft's example with the new Visual Studio Community edition and made all their components available for free for individual developers or companies with less than 5 developers and less than $1m turnover.

So here it is. Syncfusion EssentialStudio.
http://www.syncfusion.com/products/communitylicense

We've been using some of their components for the past couple of years and we're due to renew our license later this month so I was quite relieved that we won't need to fork out all that money to renew again. The R/$ exchange rate is a b#tch at the moment for renewing our licenses from the US.

Anyway, just for interest sake, we've used their Winforms controls, but phased most of it out and replaced it with DotNetBar (more lightweight). We use their File Formats extensively (generate Excel, Word, Pdf files using their object library without needing to have the actual software installed... and it performs very well) and we're starting to use their MVC components now after they've completely revamped it middle last year.

They obviously have components for WPF, Silverlight, Mobile and so forth, but we've never really got to that.
Anyway, for those who like this, enjoy.

[Solitude]

That's amazing ViperGTI! Thanks for sharing. We use Telerik controls at work but this will be perfect for my own projects.

[Isengard]

I know there are a couple of developers on here so I thought I'd share this. Was visiting one of our component providers and noticed that they followed Microsoft's example with the new Visual Studio Community edition and made all their components available for free for individual developers or companies with less than 5 developers and less than $1m turnover.

So here it is. Syncfusion EssentialStudio.
http://www.syncfusion.com/products/communitylicense

We've been using some of their components for the past couple of years and we're due to renew our license later this month so I was quite relieved that we won't need to fork out all that money to renew again. The R/$ exchange rate is a b#tch at the moment for renewing our licenses from the US.

Anyway, just for interest sake, we've used their Winforms controls, but phased most of it out and replaced it with DotNetBar (more lightweight). We use their File Formats extensively (generate Excel, Word, Pdf files using their object library without needing to have the actual software installed... and it performs very well) and we're starting to use their MVC components now after they've completely revamped it middle last year.

They obviously have components for WPF, Silverlight, Mobile and so forth, but we've never really got to that.
Anyway, for those who like this, enjoy.

We started checking this out in the office, thanks for the headsup!

[matt]

I know there are a couple of developers on here so I thought I'd share this. Was visiting one of our component providers and noticed that they followed Microsoft's example with the new Visual Studio Community edition and made all their components available for free for individual developers or companies with less than 5 developers and less than $1m turnover.

So here it is. Syncfusion EssentialStudio.
http://www.syncfusion.com/products/communitylicense

We've been using some of their components for the past couple of years and we're due to renew our license later this month so I was quite relieved that we won't need to fork out all that money to renew again. The R/$ exchange rate is a b#tch at the moment for renewing our licenses from the US.

Anyway, just for interest sake, we've used their Winforms controls, but phased most of it out and replaced it with DotNetBar (more lightweight). We use their File Formats extensively (generate Excel, Word, Pdf files using their object library without needing to have the actual software installed... and it performs very well) and we're starting to use their MVC components now after they've completely revamped it middle last year.

They obviously have components for WPF, Silverlight, Mobile and so forth, but we've never really got to that.
Anyway, for those who like this, enjoy.

Thanks for the link

Ahhh! They have a Gantt chart! I've been searching for one of those, and I just had a client fork out a ton of cash to renew his Telerik license to get their new Gannt chart just a couple of months ago.

Demo's are taking very long to come up but I'll totally check this out.

[FarligOpptreden]

I generally despise third party controls. More often than not they add unnecessary bloat to your projects and they don't offer the customizability power users require. Other than that, they often look very generic and your product ends up lost in a sea of clones.

The only third party framework I use is jQuery. The rest I build myself.

[ViperGTI]

I generally despise third party controls. More often than not they add unnecessary bloat to your projects and they don't offer the customizability power users require. Other than that, they often look very generic and your product ends up lost in a sea of clones.

The only third party framework I use is jQuery. The rest I build myself.

Don't really agree with that. Sure some do bloat your projects and Syncfusion does like to drag a whole bunch of their own assemblies along in the deployment, but it would be a huge waste of time to go and develop my own controls and basically reinvent the wheel.
The grid and diagram controls for instance or even just libraries that write directly to Excel / Word. 3rd party providers spend enormous amounts of hours building specialised versions of these controls and making them as flexible as possible. The diagram control for instance can generate anything from Visio diagrams to organisational charts and to develop a grid control that has the same functionality and performance as the one I'm currently using (not from Syncfusion though), no thanks. I'd rather spent my time customising an existing control than develop from scratch.

Our priority is to develop new features in our software for clients and if we had to spent all the time developing our own controls first, we'd never get finished. We're backlogged as it is.

[FarligOpptreden]

Don't really agree with that. Sure some do bloat your projects and Syncfusion does like to drag a whole bunch of their own assemblies along in the deployment, but it would be a huge waste of time to go and develop my own controls and basically reinvent the wheel.
The grid and diagram controls for instance or even just libraries that write directly to Excel / Word. 3rd party providers spend enormous amounts of hours building specialised versions of these controls and making them as flexible as possible. The diagram control for instance can generate anything from Visio diagrams to organisational charts and to develop a grid control that has the same functionality and performance as the one I'm currently using (not from Syncfusion though), no thanks. I'd rather spent my time customising an existing control than develop from scratch.

Our priority is to develop new features in our software for clients and if we had to spent all the time developing our own controls first, we'd never get finished. We're backlogged as it is.

When you build a system with a very specific UI that's responsive to tablets and smartphones, you kinda need to roll your own framework. I don't believe in building a UI/UX around a set of existig controls - they need to fit into the rest of the design language.

Like I said, I've been down the third party control road and decided to go back to writing my own UI framework.