My company is starting a major greenfield development project using DevExpress WPF controls. I just read this critical review of their WPF controls:
[…] DevExpress developers completely misunderstood WPF when they developed their WPF controls. I really cannot impress upon you sufficiently well just how much of a displeasure it is using their controls. I feel absolutely terrible (almost guilty) about talking about a vendor with such negativity, but they have made a serious mistake in their WPF suite, it has been a singular source of the most abject frustration for me in about a decade of developing software.
Do you agree that DevExpress does not understand the WPF paradigm and will cause our developers grief during development and maintenance? Can you suggest an alternate vendor of WPF controls? I’m looking for a vendor with WPF controls that will enhance our application while fitting well with the WPF API, binding and MVVM.
The link (above) to the critical blog post is broken. The original author has stated:
I wrote the original article, and have decided to work with DevExpress in a private capacity after speaking with them so I have regrettably decided to remove the post. Regards, Ira
Abject frustration is EXACTLY what I experienced thanks to DevExpress. I lost hours of my life attempting to simply bind a combo box. The drop-down list at best would only display my ItemsSource class name multiple times. I even posted a StackOverflow question to figure out what I could possibly be doing wrong. Finally on a whim I tried removing this one line of xaml:
Suddenly my problem went away. It was caused by the Developer Express wpf theme DeepBlue. Discovering the problem was a tremendous relief. My company will now be using Telerik WPF controls. My colleagues are quite happy with DevExpress Asp.Net controls. It is only the WPF suite we are avoiding.