[2005] Opinions On Treeview, Menu and TabStrip Web Controls

I'm in the planning stages of a major web site upgrade from classic ASP to ASP.NET/VS2005. Part of the project is improving our web site UI to give it more of a modern web application feel rather than the old style (ie late 90's) web site look and feel it has now. Therefore I'm evaluating various Treeview, Menu, and TabStrip style controls for ASP.NET to see how they'll fit into our plans.

So, I'm looking for your suggestions and recommendations on controls that provide this kind of functionality.

Price is an important consideration so any open source solutions would be nice followed by those that have very reasonable corporate wide licensing plans. However, another major consideration is that it is easy to use and understand. Others who'll be working on this project have limited ASP.NET experience and helping them be productive quickly is important. AJAX capability would be a plus as well.

Also, if you have any ideas on web application look and feel I'd be glad to hear about them since I have almost a blank slate at this point.

Personally only used Telerik (www.telerik.com) controls, but have heard that ComponentOne (www.componentone.com) controls are good as well - both, afaik, support AJAX

Neither are open source, but Telerik is royalty free.

First question is, if the controls you want already exist in the basic ASP.NET framework, why are you looking for more controls? Is there something extra you are looking for?

I do not know of any free control suites. I do know, however of two companies whose controls I have used. Infragistics and ComponentOne. Axion has mentioned ComponentOne as well, so you can count that as two votes for C1.

You also have not mentioned what sort of controls your existing site currently uses. Chances are, you may not even need thirt party controls.

Thanks for your input so far. ComponentOne and Telerik are probably out of consideration at this point, primarily due to price. This could change if there was a compelling reason, such as saving considerable development time, but our management team is quite frugal so I have to check all other options first.

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Originally Posted by mendhak

First question is, if the controls you want already exist in the basic ASP.NET framework, why are you looking for more controls? Is there something extra you are looking for?

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Primarily ease of use and useful features and styles beyond what the stock Menu and Treeview offer. I could probably customize the stock ones myself if I had to but I'd really rather focus on improving our business and database layers and developing our web services system rather than re-inventing the wheel.

I didn't see a TabStrip in the standard web project controls list. Did I miss it somewhere? :confused:

AJAX functionality will probably be important on a few of pages where dynamic updates will be used but I think the MS AJAX Control Toolkit should fill that need rather well for now.

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Originally Posted by mendhak

You also have not mentioned what sort of controls your existing site currently uses. Chances are, you may not even need thirt party controls.

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It uses a couple of custom built ActiveX controls and one purchased one, FileUp. One of the things pushing this upgrade project are our clients complaining about having to install these controls in order to use the "clients only" section of the site. Many of them have their users on lower level (non-admin) security levels and this often creates support problems for us.

Other than that, the application portion of the site is very plain looking, particularly compared to the public facing portion of the site. Management wants it to look and function more like a desktop application than an old fashioned looking, mostly static, web site. "More dynamic", "More modern looking", "More professional looking" are statements that have been thrown around.

Go to www.411asp.net

You will be able to find lots of controls there, some free, some expensive. You can go through the free ones and decide which ones you like.


You are looking for a TabStrip control. But there isn't a native ASP.NET TabStrip control. Take a look at the MultiView control instead.


If your updates are simple, MS AJAX will be overkill and you ought to consider hand coding that bit of the site.