This is kindred to but different from the question I posted a half hour ago, Is WPF development faster or slower than classic ASP.NET (web forms).
I’m curious about how much of a productivity boost we might reasonably expect, if we use Telerik (or DevExpress or Infragistics, etc) for our WPF project. It’s a big enough project that we’ll have time to ramp up on whichever library we select. Our application will have a fairly complex UI around a calendar; otherwise it’s pretty vanilla. We don’t have very much WPF experience.
I know that it depends, esp. on how many of the controls are useful, how much we need to customize them for our application, etc.
If you can (somehow) encompass those dependencies and arrive at some number, that would be great. In my dreams:
I’ve done large WPF projects with and
without a third-party control library
(Infragistics, in my case) — and
using the library roughly doubled our
productivity.
Or halved it, whatever your experience is.
My experience is that using a good, clean 3rd party control set does increase productivity, especially if the control set includes features which are required by your project.
For example, I’m currently using Telerik’s WPF controls, and the Data Grid control alone has probably cut our total development time in half (for the specific project where it’s needed), as it automatically handles things that are a pain to setup by hand using the standard DataGrid class.
That being said, if we hadn’t used that class, the difference would have been minimal. There still would have been an improvement, especially given some of the improvements for data input (ie: nicer numeric controls), but the change would have been far less dramatic.
I would recommend, however, that you take the learning curve into account when choosing a product suite. Telerik’s WPF products, for example, have a relatively low learning curve, as they are designed much like the standard WPF controls. My experience with DevExpress’s WPF controls, on the other hand, are quite different – pretty much the opposite extreme. DevExpress tends to lend itself towards using their control suites nearly exclusively, and have a custom workflow in place. Once you learn this, it’s quite nice – but they’re different than using standard controls, and tend to be fairly pervasive in terms of where and how they’re used. Infragistics and ComponentOne fall in the middle of these two extremes, from my experiences.