Devexpress Windows Controls are unintuitive to use?

I am seeking general opinion here. I and my team have been working on a Windows project that uses DevExpress Winform controls. After working on these for more than 6 months , more than half of us are left with a feeling that DevExpress is not only over开发者_StackOverflowly complicated and unintuitive ( compared to standard Windows forms controls ) to program with , but they are also seriously flawed in some design situations.

Anyone who has used the controls in production projects want to add ?

---

I've been working with the DevExpress controls for about a year now (mainly XtraGrid).

We switched to XtraGrid because the standard WinForms grid controls ran out of gas very early in the development of my application (a scientific instrumentation app).

I agree with your comment about their controls being somewhat complicated and non-intuitive. There are so many features it's often hard to wade through all the properties, and understand how they interact.

I don't agree "they are also seriously flawed in some design situations" - my experience has been the opposite. The overall design seems so powerful and well thought out that almost anything is possible (though I often need guidance from their tech support to implement the features I need).

The excellent tech support (24 hour turnaround on all questions) is the key here - if I can't figure out how to do what I want relatively quickly, I just send a support request.

This was a change in my work habits - I generally prefer to figure things out myself - but has been working well on my project.

Overall, I'm very happy we went with DevExpress.

---

Working in DevExpress, I think that our controls architecture is very good and the controls are rather intuitive. However, I also understand that the learning curve can be somehow difficult just because controls provide a lot of features. Many features lead to complexity and it seems it is impossible to create a rich functional control which would be easy to use. I can only guarantee you that our support team will be glad to help if you decide to use our controls... Anyway, it is entirely your choice.

---

Having used DevExpress controls extensively, I assume that you're talking about XtraGrid.

XtraGrid doesn't have any objects for individual rows and cells, forcing you to use Row Handles along with lots of methods on GridView to do anything to the grid.
This makes the grid much more scalable; XtraGrid will perform much faster on large datasets than its competitors, which have objects for each row and cell (I speak from personal experience).

I haven't had any trouble with XtraEditors; once you get used to the RepositoryItem class and the Properties property (which are necessary for embedding), they're not hard to use.