Using Umbraco and DevExpress DXperience together

Umbraco is a world known CMS for the Microsoft .NET platform and DevExpress has some very good ASP.NET controls to improve and extend the what you get out of the box from Microsoft.
On the net I have found posts from other users that have tried but not made this work properly. I decided to give it a try myself.

About the author

I do not work as a full-time developer, my developing experience is limited to what I get to do on my spare time. I have used Umbraco for some years, but only as a CMS - I have never developed my own code for Umbraco until recently. The DevExpress components are way to expensive for me, I have downloaded a trial and worked on the samples that came with.
For this test I have used a Windows 7 x64 laptop with Visual Studio 2010, Umbraco 4.61 and Developer Express v2010 vol 2.

What did I try?

I decided to use the ASPxRoundPanel to get started. This just to try a comonent that does not require much backend work. I also used the ASPxGridView with code from the demo center to try out AJAX callbacks.

How did it go?

As I ran everything on my laptop (with DevExpress installed in the GAC) I just had to copy some lines from the Visual Studio project web.config to Umbraco web.config. I placed all DevExpress references on the top of the list where I had to merge configuration.
Editing the master page from Umbraco was easy, I just added the assembly reference needed by ASPxRoundPanel and it worked on my first try. The panel wasn't perfect, some glitches on top of the panel. I guess this is because I modified an existing HTML5 template and did not do any further work on that issue.

Using ASPxGridView was more challenging as it required me to add some lines of C# code as well. Umbraco has no good way to make me do so, at least not from what I have found. I ended up dropping the code lines as they did not seem important (just editing some display options) and I struggled a little to add a reference to DevExpress.Data into my master page. In the end the control loaded and I could update my data (change page) without loading the entire page.

What did I learn?

The most important thing I learned is that DevExpress ASP.NET AJAX controls can be used with Umbraco. I also learned that I need to figure out how to write my own code and tie it with Umbraco master pages.

Many of the controls could fit perfectly into a CMS (like navigation, news control, cloud, site map) but I guess we need to write some code to make that work.