Most performant ASP.NET web controls suite

Question

Personally I've been working for years with Telerik's RadControls and DevExpress ASP.NET controls. IMHO they both produce quite an impressive HTML overhead on the client side thus for that I've never been highly pleased with them.

Of course I also know about Infragistics, ComponentOne, ComponentArt, etc. I'd assume they are not much different than those I mentioned.

Which (commercial) controls suite generates the most compact HTML on the client side?

I'm inclined to think there is no "most performant controls suite" rather a combination of server controls and Javascript based controls (eg. jQuery UI). Would you agree with that?

What combinations did you achieve the best/most performant user experience with?

Answer 1

Update 27 Jan 2012

Since my original answer, I have spent a lot of time working with MVC. As I said below, you have full control over the markup generated, which is great. I have also spend some time using Telerik MVC (http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc) controls and I must say, they have done a great job of keeping the tools functional, while minimising the markup and script sizes. They have introduced a Script registrar which allows you to register which scripts to include on the page. This allows you to also register your own custom scripts, which can be combined into a single resource and compressed for low latency and bandwidth.

Original Accepted Post:

You are correct in that commercial control suites tend to generate heavy markup and script overhead. This is partly due to the fact that they have traditionally had to deal with the ASP.NET postback and viewstate page workflow, which results in long-winded control Ids and a proliferation of many small javascript downloads (adding latency for each file).

Also, many controls tend to try to add too much functionality. They try to do it all but this makes doing anything simple with them quite a chore as there is a steep learning curve for a lot of these suites, as I am sure you are finding.

If you want to improve the download size and markup generated on your page, my advice would be to use a combination of ASP.NET MVC (great control over markup, no viewstate or _doPostBack scripts everywhere) and JQuery plugins, whic you touched on in your question.

Take a look at the markup of StacOverflow. It is written in MVC. Not sure what 3rd partycontrols they use.

The worst offender for hevy markup is often Grids. Take a look at the JQGrid http://trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

Answer 2

Try Obout control suit. They are very effective and bring productivity with much low overheads.

http://www.obout.com/