Telerik controls in ASP.NET MVC

Question

Telerik claims their controls work with ASP.NET MVC now. Has anyone already used the controls in a MVC project?

My company uses the Telerik ASP.NET controls in a large application and it works out quite well. That's why we think about using them in a MVC project.

EDIT 1: telerik has a new go at ASP.NET MVC this looks much better then their first go at it. But it was to late for my project. http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-mvc.aspx

Solicitor

As per today, Telerik has moved into KendoUi for MVC/Mobile controls. The existing RAD controls, they are only good for web forms. – Bhatt

Answer 1

You may have already seen it, but Telerik has a blog post about how to use their controls with MVC and some of the limitations. I don't actually use their controls so I can't speak to whether the limitations are really a problem. It does appear that there is a a little more "manual lifting", so to speak, when using the controls with MVC but that there are workarounds to get most of them to work properly.

I'm hoping that they will eventually release MVC versions of their controls. I'm holding off evaluating them until that happens, but if you're already using them I'd certainly look to see how easy they would be to use with MVC. Perhaps you could update your question with an answer if you give it a try and let the rest of us know how it went.

Thornton

Then you should start now. They released new components. Pure MVC. Open source. This looks promising. telerik.com/products/aspnet-mvc.aspx – Solicitor

I have since downloaded their code, but I'm waiting for the right project to start using them. I'm in the middle of a couple of projects right now and don't want to introduce any new variables. – Thornton

Did you guys see the 'wiring' for these controls? Don't get me wrong, i used telerik controls on webforms for over a year and loved them. But they're not for MVC - pumping data into the session; casting into GridModel just to 'bind' - the MVC paradigm trys to avoid this binding concept inherently by its nature. MVC is supposed to encourage restful practises. Bound session-based state controls seem to be to contradict restful practises to me. [just my thoughts] – Shwalb

@cottsak Thats what I thought after some time playing around with it. It seems that in the end they came to the same conclusion. – Solicitor

Telerik is not open source btw. $999 for a handful of controls is pretty steep. – Vladamir

the site states: The Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC are licensed under the widely adopted GPLv2. – Solicitor

Answer 2

You could check out the demo application (a forums application) they built using ASP.NET MVC, announced here. Source code is available.

The demo is a simple- and stylish - forums application. It uses 9 of the RadControls, including RadGrid, RadEditor, RadChart, RadTreeView and RadUpload, to build a forum site that has basic thread/post navigation, formatted forum posting, user authentication (with support for custom avatars), and a site activity "Statistics" view. Everything you need to have a fully functional MVC forums app. The source is available for immediate download, so I encourage anyone interested in learning more about MVC or the RadControls in MVC to grab the bites and study the example.

Requiem

-1 The first version of teleriks ASP.NET MVC controlls is not worth it. – Solicitor

Answer 3

I have been using the Telerik controls for about 6 months. I have been using the Grid and Window controls on MVC 2. Like most commercial products there are issues we have been fortunate to work them out. Once you get past the initial learning curve the controls are time savers. You can't beat the price for the amount of functionality you get.

My biggest issue is that they seem a bit sluggish responding on their forums. Maybe I'm just asking lame questions. I've been lobbying management to pay the $ for the supported version. Considering the amount of time we spend digging around to solve some of the more complicated problems I think it would be worth it.

Quintillion

Answer 4

I've just had a look at their grid and wrote a small POC project with it and must say I'm quite impressed. I'm not sure about their previous MVC controls iterations, but the current one can be a real time saver. It also fits very nicely into ASP.NET MVC ajax applications since there is a rich client-side API. Having jquery DataTables on the client side results in an even better user experience (because it is much faster), but also requires more error-prone javascript code.

Electrograph

Answer 5

As an alternative, you can check for MDBootstrap (it´s a front-end framework built on top of Bootstrap). There you will find an article with free ASP.NET MVC templates.

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