Free components for .NET developers

[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.