Fat Agnus

Apparently Telerik read my article about me not liking their product so much and they took the time to write to me, because they wanted to know more. I`m really impressed by that sort of commitment, even though I don`t like their products (you could learn something from this ComponentArt ;)).

In the article I probably didn`t give enough reasons why I think their products aren`t that great, so I kind of owe that to Telerik, since they was polite enough to write me.

The issues

To be honest Telerik is probably doing the best they can to create some useful controls, and to be fair, some of the issues with the controls falls back on the whole idea of how Asp.Net WebForms works (a concept that I don`t really like).

Difficult to handle the rendered html

The issue with this is that since it is drag n drop (I personally don`t use the designer in visual studio), you can put them anywhere you like. The controls sometimes happen to render some funky Html, that makes it a bit difficult to have the control play nicely with the rest of your Html/Css.

Slow Javascript

One of their controls which I find to be really slow is the WYSIWYG editor. It takes ages to render and if you are so unlucky that you need to add more than one on the same page, then your users a screwed. Not every user is sitting on a computer that is reasonably fast and they might still be using IE6.

Debugging the Javscript?

Not a change. It would be really nice if this was possible because sometimes the javascript from the controls doesn`t always do what you might think it would do, and then you would like to know why.

Inline Javascript

When you are using WebForms with Viewstate the data in your page starts to pile up and controls like the once from Telerik and ComponentArt adds lot of extra data in form of javascript code to the page (depending on the control of course). All this just makes the page even slower.

Here is an idea

I have spoken with a friend about this and we both agree that is would be a great idea if they made a Javascript Framework, which you could be able to use just like PrototypeJs. Because lets face it, there are a lot of cool javascripts out there and people add all kinds of different scripts to the page. This will also make your page render even more slowly, so if you could minimize this with an open framework (which you probably based your controls on), then that would be a great move.

Because the less javascript files you have to add, the faster your page will render.