Comparison of certain SyncFusion components to other vendors' components

[Charles Wolfersberger]

Since I am on a roll tonight (posted 5 issues to the forum tonight) I thought I would add one more post giving my compliments to SyncFusion for developing some great tools and provide some of the reasons why we made the switch to SyncFusion's components.

DOCKABLE WINDOWS
Having worked with Actipro's dockable windows component for 6 months (version 2.0.188), SyncFusion's Docking Manager is clearly a more functional component for the following few reasons:

-WYSIWYG in design time; Actipro's component requires you to add all dockable windows through code-you can't see what your form will look like until you run the app.
-Adjustable flyout height and width for autohidden windows; no property/method available with Actipro's control.
-Close enabled property; unable to eliminate close button with Actipro's control
-Adjustable flyout speed for autohidden windows; no property available with Actipro's control
-Able to capture the hide/show events for autohidden windows; Actipro's component cannot capture these (in my opinion, rather important) events.
-Finally, Actipro's most recent maintenance release on their Dockable Windows component is almost 5 months old. Too long a time to wait for bug fixes and feature requests.

XPTASKBAR
Having worked with Developer Express' XtraNavBar (version 1.0.0.0), moved over to using the XPTaskBar for the following reasons:

-Adjustable flyout speed for taskbarboxes; feature not available in XtraNavBar
-Many of the listitem property settings are lost when an XtraNavBar is copied/pasted
-Able to programmatically collapse/expand all taskbarboxes; XtraNavBar groupboxes can only expand or collapse in any given event-you cannot collapse one box and expand another all within one event
-Able to add other controls within the taskbarboxes (major advantage); no such functionality available with XtraNavBar.
-Finally, DevExpress' most recent maintenance release for the XtraNavBar component is almost 5 months old with plans for another maintenance release "sometime this year."

XPMenus
I used ComponentOne's menus and toolbars for almost 8 months before switching to SyncFusion's XPMenus. I have been pleasently suprised with several features that make SyncFusion's menus much easier to create and maintain. For example, SyncFusion's menus provide the ability to automatically list MDI child forms in the menu through the MDIListBar item without writing any code; no such feature is available with ComponentOne's menus and toolbars. One note: ComponentOne's menus and toolbars do not work well with SyncFusion's DockableWindows component (significant screen flicker occurs).

For anyone evaluating components, hope this helps out.

Regards,

Charles