I have used Infragistics components for winforms since long time ago, during those years I learned a lot by the hard way: browsing the web. It's the hard way because there are too much to read, sometimes it is related to other versión of components, or the examples are for technology that we don't use (JavaScript vs Razor for example). Usually the architecture of the components is obscure, you have to read a lot to try understand the minimun. Sometimes the examples provided are unclear. And so on. It would be good if people at Infragistics makes things a little easier for developers who just want to make the thing works by providing examples with clear, unambiguous explanations and focuse on the technology we want (for example MVC with Razor). Your components are great, but hard to understand for the average developer. Publishing an ebook with examples like "XYZ for Dummies" style would make our life better. ;)
Luis,
Thank you for the honest feedback. Believe it or not, we are trying to help folks in your situation, and we know we have room to improve. :)
For Ignite UI in particular, which I think is what you're working with now based on your mention of MVC with Razor, we are making numerous specific improvements to our overall docs experience, making the docs that we do have easier to discover, improving our infrastructure so that we can publish more docs more regularly, as well as always looking for specific areas of improvement and augmentation.
Just so you (and others) will know what we do have today, I'll share these resources:
Despite all of this, we do recognize that we do have areas for improvement, and I welcome specific suggestions (like your ebook one) as well as any info on what you wanted to see but couldn't find.
Thanks again for the feedback!
One of the things I appreciate from Infragistics is your support to developers, you always answer our questions, and that's good, that's why I do preffer your components beside others in the market. For the next generation of developers and for people like me that are new to web development (I have a lot of experience with desktop development) it would be nice to have a complete and deeper guide about the architecture of igGrid. I think it deserves a complete book apart, with drawings and examples for Razor. It is frustrating when you have to spend hours and days to understand what happens if you change one option of the grid. Just to give a case look at https://ko.infragistics.com/community/forums/f/ignite-ui-for-javascript/76930/grid-transactions-when-autocommit-true/388804#388804 In this case the answer was:
This transaction log plays a role in the updating functionality only if autoCommit is set to false.
and
A more detailed explanation would be that "pending" transactions are both reflected in the grid as pending and they are present until something calls or triggers the commit() API method. The transactions that are sent to the server are very similar in purpose, but they live until the saveChanges() method is called explicitly (and this method is not needed for a scenario where the igGrid is bound to client-side data) and they aren't really reflected in the igGrid's UI.
Understanding how one thing is related to another by the way of browsing the web, reading posts, guessing, preparing examples, adapting the examples to the personal escenario, etc, is time consuming and sometimes desperate. A better approach, I think, is to have just one point of reference, official, clear, very clear, unambiguously, with drawings, maybe videos like the ones you already have in YouTube.
As you see, I'm focusing on the igGrid control, this is the best grid control in the market for displaying data, but when you come to edition, it is hard to understand. For years I used UltraWinGrid version for editing with typed datasets with two or more bands and with batch updating, it's just perfect. Now, I would like to do the same with igGrid. I know, this is another story. That's why I would appreciate to have a good reference as I satyed before. Well, guys, thank you for listening to me. By now I will keep surfing the web, posting... researching ;)
Thank you Ambrose for answering.
Thanks, Luis. That is very helpful feedback. I actually have a TOC for just such a book, and I would be happy to get your input on if you have the time/are interested.
That's fantastic Ambrose, I encourage you to do it, count on me if I can help in some way. Regards.