Productivity of WPF development, with and without Telerik (for example)

This is kindred to but different from the question I posted a half hour ago, Is WPF development faster or slower than classic ASP.NET (web forms).

I'm curious about how much of a productivity boost we might reasonably expect, if we use Telerik (or DevExpress or Infragistics, etc) for our WPF project. It's a big en开发者_高级运维ough project that we'll have time to ramp up on whichever library we select. Our application will have a fairly complex UI around a calendar; otherwise it's pretty vanilla. We don't have very much WPF experience.

I know that it depends, esp. on how many of the controls are useful, how much we need to customize them for our application, etc.

If you can (somehow) encompass those dependencies and arrive at some number, that would be great. In my dreams:

I've done large WPF projects with and without a third-party control library (Infragistics, in my case) -- and using the library roughly doubled our productivity.

Or halved it, whatever your experience is.

My experience is that using a good, clean 3rd party control set does increase productivity, especially if the control set includes features which are required by your project.

For example, I'm currently using Telerik's WPF controls, and the Data Grid control alone has probably cut our total development time in half (for the specific project where it's needed), as it automatically handles things that are a pain to setup by hand using the standard DataGrid class.

That being said, if we hadn't used that class, the difference would have been minimal. There still would have been an improvement, especially given some of the improvements for data input (ie: nicer numeric controls), but the change would have been far less dramatic.

I would recommend, however, that you take the learning curve into account when choosing a product suite. Telerik's WPF products, for example, have a relatively low learning curve, as they are designed much like the standard WPF controls. My experience with DevExpress's WPF controls, on the other hand, are quite different - pretty much the opposite extreme. DevExpress tends to lend itself towards using their control suites nearly exclusively, and have a custom workflow in place. Once you learn this, it's quite nice - but they're different than using standard controls, and tend to be fairly pervasive in terms of where and how they're used. Infragistics and ComponentOne fall in the middle of these two extremes, from my experiences.

Reed pretty much stated it all. Just want to add my opinion:

In Winforms days a 3rd party control set mattered a LOT more than in WPF. For our WPF projects we haven't yet found anything we couldn't do ourselves (well except maybe Actipro's Syntaxeditor which'd be fairly complex to implement) or which otherwise wasn't offered exactly like we needed it. So this is also a question of:

Do you need all the controls in the set, and also do you need all the functions they offer, or do you even need more than what they offer?

Or do you have the time and skill to easily write them yourself? If you find yourself restyling these controls a lot, it might be questionable if they offer so much more functionality than what you might be able to do yourself.

One last thing: If you don't have too much WPF experience, having such a 3rd party library will only make up for that until a certain point (if at all - you can certainly create crappy Telerik software). WPF has a fairly steep learning curve so you might at first try without any 3rd party stuff and invest if you find you can't do something.

so to sum it up: I've done large WPF projects with and without a third-party control library (Actipro in my case) - and using the library roughly didn't matter for our productivity.

same with me. main reason we use Infragistics WPF libraries for Charting and DataGrid. I think the 3rd party library that you choose depends on if you can afford it :) and also how good is their support. have been using Infragistics for some time now, been OK (not great support wise).

And it def improved productivity as you dont have mess around with boilerplate code