3rd party .NET controls

3rd Party Controls for .NET Applications

Introduction 3rd party controls for .NET Applications are the most popular and extensively utilized by developers while developing Windows-based .Net applications, MVC, AJAX, and ASP.NET.  Not only do .NET controls allow developers to create intuitive user interfaces for their programs, but they also increase productivity. While Microsoft provides a basic set of controls with Visual […]

.NET Applications

22 Sep, 2021 | Web Development

3rd Party Controls for .NET Applications

Introduction

3rd party controls for .NET Applications are the most popular and extensively utilized by developers while developing Windows-based .Net applications, MVC, AJAX, and ASP.NET. 

Not only do .NET controls allow developers to create intuitive user interfaces for their programs, but they also increase productivity.

While Microsoft provides a basic set of controls with Visual Studio, 3rd party suites include many controls with a variety of unique capabilities for developing programs for personal computers and portable mobile devices.

7 Best 3rd Party Controls for. Net Applications

1.       DevExpress:

DevExpress

DevExpress provides feature-rich user interface controls, enterprise-grade reporting systems, automated web testing tools, and frameworks for business applications. Whether, their solutions allow you to develop your finest, get a better understanding of complicated software, improve your productivity, and create beautiful touch-enabled apps on next-gen mobile platforms, the web, and Windows – without constraints or compromises.

Read about the best ASP.NET Tools for development.

Features and Benefits of DevExpress

·    Best UI Components:

With DevExpress UI components for MVC. ASP.NET Web Forms, and ASP.NET Core, you can create responsive, interactive, and high-performance line-of-business web apps. This includes bootstrap web forms with over 20 chart kinds and over 45 controls, as well as ASP.NET Core with over 70 components and 20 chart types. 

·   Incredible User-Interface:

DevExtreme offers a complete collection of high-performance and responsive user interface components for use with both conventional online and next-generation mobile apps. The package includes a feature-rich data grid, interactive chart components, and data editors, among other things so DevExtreme enables you to create incredible user experiences for today’s latest web browsers.

·   A lot of Controls and Chart Types:

With DevExpress UI components for Delphi VCL, WPF, and WinForms, you can create beautiful, high-impact user experiences and mimic the features of today’s most popular business productivity applications so this contains VCL suites with over 230 controls, WinUI suites with over 20 chart kinds and over 10 controls, and a WPF suite with over 50 chart types and over 120 controls.

·   Generate Complexity of Data Model:

Utilize XAF wizards to generate any complexity of data model from an existing database, or create the model manually in code or using the visual scheme designer. In addition, XAF creates a final, completely configurable UI based on your data model automatically. And also contains everything you need to get started: different analytics, charting, reporting, application navigation, menus, and various data forms – all driven by Devexpress’s award-winning libraries and controls. When a user’s needs or the context of usage changes the data model and accompanying UI adapt.

.Net 5 Support: Yes

Free Trial: Yes. 30-day free trial. Grab it from here –https://www.devexpress.com/products/try/ 

Pricing

They have pricing plans for individual products and various packages as well. 

You can check out their detailed pricing here – https://www.devexpress.com/buy/net/ 

2.   Telerik:

Telerik

Telerik created the marketing analytics platform and Progress Sitefinity content management. It equips IT, teams, and developers, to enable enterprise-level digital marketing by improving the customer journey via the delivery of seamless, customized experiences across many technologies and devices. Sitefinity provides customers with Web Content Management and a Cloud-based Digital Experience Management solution.

Its Web Content Management function makes use of intuitive interfaces that make content creation as simple as dragging and dropping widgets into a page possible. Additionally, users may create and modify content directly on the page using Sitefinity’s Inline Editing functionality.

Features and Benefits of Telerik

·   Management of Sites:

Multisite administration on the platform enables businesses to easily manage a collection of microsites and websites through a single interface. Additionally, it offers solutions for search, forums, blogs, eCommerce, social media, email campaigns, and mobile, as well as a toolkit for linking visitors with customized content automatically.

·   Generating SEO-friendly URLs:

Additionally, Sitefinity generates SEO-friendly URLs for each page. Sitefinity configures an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect to inform Google and other search engines if pages are subsequently relocated or renamed.

·   Automatic SEO:

These SEO activities are performed automatically, without user involvement, unless the user specifies specific parameters. Every customer contact that happens along the customer journey is stored in the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud.

·   Helps With Tracking:

It enables simple tracking of consumer behavior trends based on any kind of customer contact, such as website views, video playback, document downloads, form submissions, or attendance at events. It then combines all client contacts via the use of complete integration architecture, resulting in a 360-degree customer profile that encompasses all information gathered about a prospect, anonymous or not. 

Read About .NET 6 here, in our blog.

.NET Support: Yes

Free Trial: They do offer a free trial. You can catch that from here- https://www.telerik.com/download

Pricing:

They have product bundles to offer –

  • DevCraft UI: This will cost you $ 1299 per developer,
  • DevCraft Complete: This will cost you $ 1499 per developer,
  • DevCraft Ultimate: This will cost you $ 2199 per developer.

3. Infragistics:

Infragistics

Infragistics Ultimate offers toolkits for the Uno platform, UWP or Universal Windows Platform, and WinUI or Windows UI. These preview toolkits feature charts, grids, calendars, and data input, allowing developers to create cross-platform apps that run on desktop, mobile, and web.

Infragistics Ultimate’s industry-leading UI toolkits for WPF and Windows Forms make it simple for developers to create attractive, high-performance contemporary desktop apps. A comprehensive collection of over 100 touch-friendly user interface elements and components is included, including calendars, spreadsheets, grids, and charts, all based on Microsoft’s latest.NET Core foundation.

Features and Benefits

·   Incredible Collection: 

Infragistics Ultimate is the industry’s most comprehensive collection of enterprise-grade .NET and JavaScript charts, grids, and user interface components and controls. With native libraries for Web Components, React, jQuery, Blazor, ASP.NET MVC, and Angular, developers are empowered to build or recreate attractive experiences in any web framework.

·   Great Recording and Monitoring: 

Record and monitor user interactions with your user interface prototypes and get real-time data as participants complete tasks. Keep track of the time required to complete each job and the success percentage for each assignment. There are no restrictions on the number of participants or user videos.

·   Attractive and Interactive: 

Embed attractive and interactive data visualizations into your .Net applications to showcase your company data in context. Reveal’s native SDKs are compatible with apps built on any platform or technology stack, including Node. JS, Java, .NET Core (coming soon), and front-end technologies such as MVC, jQuery, VueJS, Web Component, Angular, React, as well as Java frameworks like Apache, Tomcat, and Spring. 

Pricing

They have 3 best value bundles –

·       Ignite UI: This has all the essential UI components library for web developers. For 1 year this one will cost you $ 849, for 2 years it will cost you $ 1529, and for 3 years it will cost you $ 2165 per year, for 1 developer and royalty-free subscription.

·       Infragistics Ultimate: This is the complete UX/UI toolkit and design-to-code solution for desktop, mobile, and web. For 1 year this one will cost you $ 1099, for 2 years it will cost you $ 1979, and for 3 years it will cost you $ 2805 per year, for 1 developer and a royalty-free subscription.

·       Infragistics Professional: This has a comprehensive UI components library for desktop, mobile, and web. For 1 year this one will cost you $ 999, for 2 years it will cost you $ 1799, and for 3 years it will cost you $ 2549 per year, for 1 developer and a royalty-free subscription.

For priority support, you can pay an additional $ 500 per year for each plan.

.NET 5 Support: No (Coming Soon)

Read here, if it will be beneficial for you to migrate to .NET 5.

Free Trial: They offer 30-day free trials. You can grab their trial from here – https://www.infragistics.com/free-downloads

4.   Kendo UI:

Kendo UI

Kendo UI is a comprehensive JavaScript UI toolkit that enables you to rapidly create attractive, high-performance, high-quality responsive web-based. Net applications that connect with your preferred framework (Vue, React, Angular, and jQuery).

Moreover, it has a huge collection of widely used and customizable components, ranging from complex charts and grids to simple buttons, so you won’t have to spend development time creating your UI. Our extensive theme collection enables you to quickly implement a uniform look and feel throughout the whole user experience. Kendo UI’s proven quality comes from the industry’s top brand in UI components, allowing you to minimize risk while still increasing functionality.

Major Features and Benefits of Kendo UI

·   Very Recognized and Popular: 

Kendo UI is a well-established and widely used library. Their internal QA methodology, along with world-class support staff and a huge user community, ensures that their components always function as intended.

·   Very Supportive: 

Kendo UI was built from the bottom up to support each framework and provides the greatest UI performance when working with popular modern technologies such as Vue, React, Angular, and jQuery. Kendo UI integrates seamlessly with your environment, saving you time on integration.

Some Unique Solutions: 

They provide solutions that include sophisticated schedulers, spreadsheets, charts, components, and a lot more. By integrating our customizable components, Kendo UI enables you to rapidly and simply add additional functionality to your project. Customizable themes make it simple to maintain a uniform look and feel across all of your applications.

Incredible UI Components: 

Easily include sophisticated UI components into current projects or start from scratch with our extensive collection. Kendo UI saves you time by integrating components that handle all of the critical UI functions, allowing you to concentrate your development efforts on your unique features.

Pricing

Kendo UI will cost you $ 999 per developer

.Net 5 Support: Yes

Free Trial: You can grab their free trial from here – https://www.telerik.com/download

5.   FusionCharts:

fusion charts

FusionCharts is the most widely used JavaScript charting package for a variety of reasons. For starters, it has over 90 chart kinds and 950+ maps, as well as comprehensive documentation and a drill-down feature. It provides an incredible user experience across all devices and browsers. Without breaking a sweat, you can develop Javascript/HTML5 in a couple of minutes. And the charts that FusionCharts allows you to make are not the standard, uninteresting charts that you see daily. They are interactive and include a variety of useful features like simple jQuery charts, clickable legend keys, scrolling, and zooming.

Fusion Charts Features and Advantages

·   Making Charts From Scratch: 

Unless you use FusionCharts creating charts may be time-consuming. With a few clicks and adjustments, you can create charts from scratch in minutes, not hours or days. With copy & paste capabilities, amazing demonstrations that empower and educate you about best practices, and comprehensive documentation, producing charts becomes a snap. Essentially, you save a lot of time. Not to mention your ability to create visually attractive and persuasive charts.

·   Incredible Support Team: 

Despite the abundance of demonstrations, documentation, and user-friendly features, you will sometimes need assistance. FusionCharts has a staff of experienced specialists that will assist you with your duties. That is, provided you choose their premium plan, which is well worth the money.

·   Convert Live Dashboards to Images of PDF: 

FusionExport allows you to export live dashboards to PDF or picture format. It is simple to install and compatible with all JavaScript charting libraries (Chart.js, d3, HighCharts, FusionCharts, and others). It has Go, C#, Node.js, Java, and SDKs, among others. Not only can you export a dashboard in its current state, but you can also add new components to it on the fly, such as your company logo, colors, extra data in the form of tables, and whatever else you want. In JavaScript, create high-performance time series visualizations and stock charts (HTML5).

·   Visualizing Stock Data and Time Series: 

With only a few lines of code, FusionTime enables you to display time series and market data in JavaScript. Whether it’s a basic time series chart, a stock chart, a chart with millions of data points, or a sophisticated multivariate analysis, all of them may be shown with the same ease of use. You receive pre-configured interactivity such as an interactive legend, crosslines, tooltips, data range selectors, and time navigators.

Additionally, you may plot your data as an OHLC, candlestick, area, line, column, or even stacked column & area, and overlay it with data markers and events. 

.NET 5 Support: No

Free Trial: You can get a free trial of FusionCharts from here – Please download at https://www.fusioncharts.com/download

Read about the Front End Development Trends & Tools.

Pricing

They have 4 pricing plans to offer –

  • Basic ($ 499 per year): This one is perfect for a small internal dashboard or application. With this, you will get up to 1 developer.
  • Pro ($ 1299 per year): This one is perfect for SaaS applications with small teams. With this, you will get up to 5 developers.
  • Enterprise ($ 2499 per year): This one is perfect for SaaS applications with large teams and requires on-prem. With this, you will get up to 10 developers.
  • Enterprise+ (Request a quote for price): This one is perfect for unifying your charts across your organization. With this, you will get more than 11 developers.

6.   Xceed:

Xceed

Xceed is a supplier of .NET software components and tools. It provides a comprehensive set of software components and tools that help developers of Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, and every asp.net development service to create better apps. Xceed is well recognized for its zip compression libraries and data grid controls, which are utilized by Microsoft in a variety of .Net applications, including Flight Simulator, Windows Home Server, Team Foundation Server 2010, and Microsoft Office 2007. Xceed is a registered trademark in the Xceed-owned software domain.

Read here the differences between the .NET Core and .NET Framework.

Features and Benefits of Xceed

·       Best Performance:

Their innovative and optimizing attitude results in the highest possible performance. Xceed engineers stay current on the latest algorithms and technologies to create the industry’s quickest components each year.

·   Trusted by Many: 

A long number of renowned businesses and organizations from the government and military sectors, as well as university, stock exchanges, banks, military, and government fields, have already placed their confidence in Xceed. You may do the same!

·   Trustworthy Developers: 

When you opt to acquire an Xceed product, you may rely on its developers. They are doing all possible to assist you in remaining focused on your company goals due to their mastery of .NET and WPF.

Pricing

They have two pricing plans for you –

·   Ultimate Suite (The Complete Suite): Its cost starts from $ 1649.95

·   Business Suite (For WPF): Its cost starts from $ 1289.95.

.NET 5 Support: No

Free Trial: No 

7.   Aspose:

Aspose

Aspose enables us to generate, open, and edit files in Office format (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc.). However, this library is capable of nearly anything. So, it’s very powerful and includes all the tools necessary for working with Microsoft Office files. And also it is regularly updated, and the staff keeps on top of the majority of significant problems. Aspose. Slides for.NET is a stand-alone PowerPoint processing API that allows for the reading, writing, and manipulation of presentations and slides.

Developers may print presentations, render, convert, copy, modify, and generate in a variety of file formats, including ODP or Open Document Presentations, PresentationML (PPTX, OOXML), POT, PPS, and PPT. 

Aspose Major Features and Benefits

·   Native C++ Libraries:

Native C++ libraries that enable C++ programs to generate, edit, convert, and display PDF files, email messages, and PowerPoint presentations, and convert or render Excel spreadsheets. Additionally, it includes a separate C++ OCR Library for text extraction from pictures, as well as barcode creation and identification.

·   A lot of File Types: 

Aspose.Total for Java enables developers to create highly flexible file-processing systems that support over 100 major file types. Java SE or EE application developers may extend their .Net applications’ functionality by loading, creating, modifying, rendering, and inter-converting files from Cad, Project, Visio, OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, and a variety of other widely used file formats.

·   A big Collection: 

The most comprehensive collection of Aspose’s .NET file format APIs so it enables developers to generate, edit, render and print a broad variety of picture formats, including 3D, CAD, drawing, presentation, spreadsheet, and a range of documents. Aspose.Total for.NET is compatible with the Xamarin, Mono, and .NET standard platforms, as well as with additional technologies through COM Interop.

.NET 5 Support: No

Free Trial: You can check out their free trials from here – https://downloads.aspose.com/total 

Pricing

They don’t have a bundle or package system. In fact, they charge individually for each service used. You can check out their pricing plans here – https://purchase.aspose.com/pricing 

Wrapping Up

So, in conclusion in this article, we have covered the best of the 3rd party controls for .NET Applications. The ones mentioned above are the most popular, and the best in the market. Also, most of them do support .NET 5. However, there are a few on the list that doesn’t have support for .NET 5 yet but they are also working their best to make their platforms supportive as soon as possible as this Is a problem of high priority to solve. I sincerely hope this article helped. Please let me know in the comment section which of these platforms you choose and why.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the main advantages of using 3rd Party Controls for .NET Applications?

Its controls offer accelerated development, rich functionality, cross-platform compatibility, and community support, empowering developers to create robust and feature-rich .NET applications efficiently.

How do 3rd Party Controls help in speeding up the development process?

By providing pre-built components and functionalities, 3rd Party Controls eliminate the need to build complex features from scratch, allowing developers to focus on core application logic and deliver solutions faster.

Can I use 3rd Party Controls in both desktop and web-based .NET applications?

Yes, many 3rd Party Controls are designed to be platform-agnostic, enabling seamless integration in both desktop and web-based .NET applications, providing flexibility, and reducing development efforts.

How can I ensure compatibility when selecting 3rd Party Controls for my .NET application?

It’s essential to verify the compatibility of the controls with the version of the .NET framework you are using. In addition, ensure that the controls align with your project’s technical stack to ensure seamless integration.

What role do documentation and support play in choosing 3rd Party Controls?

Documentation provides essential guidance for utilizing the controls effectively. Reliable support channels, such as forums or ticket systems, help address any issues or queries that may arise during development.

Are 3rd Party Controls optimized for performance?

Yes, reputable 3rd Party Control vendors prioritize performance optimization So, evaluating benchmarks, testimonials, and reviews can help gauge the controls’ performance in real-world scenarios.