I have used 3rd party controls from many different vendors and Telerik defintely makes some outstanding controls, but what it boils down to is the right tool/control for the job. It all depends on what you are trying to accomlish.

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Jeff Smith
VivoWare, Inc. - Open Source Social Networking Modules for DNN.

One very important consideration that all developers creating any type of extension must take into account is the "rendered" page. If you are developing a stand-alone web app, you can make arbitrary decisions about the types of components you will use as your code "owns" the page. When developing for DNN, no single extension has page ownership. Every extension must not only be a good citizen on the page, but also must be coded to protect itself against those extensions that are not good citizens.

If a built-in DNN component or control addresses your extension's requirements, then you should resist the urge to look beyond and introduce another component library -- use what's already there. This ensures that when the end-user has your module or skin object or other extension on a page, they are not faced with the scenario of trying to isolate problems caused from multiple, incompatible client-side script libraries and UI metaphors/styles. When this scenario occurs, users blame not the extensions, but the platform. This hurts everybody and is easily avoidable.

The inclusion of the Telerik components and built-in support for jQuery was designed not only to standardize the tool set for developers, but more importantly to also minimize the end-user's experiences of script- and DLL-hell as these impact the user's perception of the stability of the platform. So, if you absolutely need to use other component suites, go right ahead. But do some testing with other popular modules that may be used on the same page and reproduce the end-user experience so that you can address potential problems before your end-users encouter them.

Nik

 

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Nik Kalyani
Co-founder
DotNetNuke Corporation
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