We have been a user of netadvantage for asp.net now for two years.
We purchased the product specifically for charts in our website. This has been great.
It was hoped that we could use other controls in the suite. Some of the menu controls and the webgrid offer good functionality and look pretty good too.
We would love to use these additional controls, but this will only become possible when serious perfromance issues have been addressed.
Even Infragistics own website is particularly slow. The infragistics home page exceeds 1 MEGA BYTES. That is HUGE.
There is no doubt that infragisics have some very good people and really good products and I would be concerned that they do themselves an injustice by allowing their products to be represented by such a poorly performing website.
I have been following Josh Smiths excellent articles on WPF and am looking forward to seeing the infragistics silverlight platform, however, again I am going to be a little wary regarding performance issues.
I do hope infragistics can overcome such problems. Even with 8Mbps broadband, page load times are totally unacceptable. Our own benchmark is to have page loads in under 10 seconds (for a 1Mbps connection) and NEVER more than 20 seconds. So we are not even trying to accomodate dial-up speeds.
Josh Smith, Sacha Barber and Karl Shifflett have got me reading 'the code project' where I found a link to http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html
Check out the what gets downloaded from the infragistics home page. Now some of their metrics rules may be more in line for dial-up speeds, but even so: a home page which makes 200 http requests, downloads 1,150,270 bytes, has 724,348 bytes worth of images, and has 212,390bytes of Javascript requires some serious attention to performance and usability.
The online samples site also requires some infrastructure changes that we are currently undertaking. Right now the samples on the site are basically the same samples that we ship in the product, which means they are running off an Access database. Not exactly optimal for a public facing website.
We are currently working on upgrading the samples so that they can be run from SQL server, which should dramatically improve their performance.
Glad to hear your feedback on the Silverlight controls.
Devin
Yes I did notice an improvement after the infrastructure changes. The log in and navigation is much better.
The old ASP.NET samples still perform poorly, but I put that down to the controls themselves.
However, I have just had a look at the new June CTP for Silverlight. The performance here looks pretty good AND the controls and the design of the page displaying the controls is very impressive.
It will be interesting to see how the menu and grid controls look and perform.
Socrates470BC,
Thanks for voicing your concerns - I could not agree with you more about the points you make in this post, as well as your previous post on the same topic. We have noticed a slow-down of all our properties over the past few months and are actively taking steps to rectify the situation. In fact, we already have planned a number of internal optimizations and restructurings over the weekend that should show immediate improvements on all of our properties, most notably the main website. In your previous post (linked to above) you specifically mention the performance of our samples site. While the changes we will be deploying are not directly related to our online samples, they should have a positive effect on them none-the-less. In addition to our internal server upgrades, we are also actively looking to refactor many of the samples themselves to perform better in the environment that we’ve currently got them living in.