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Management wants us to switch to Infragistics. But my boss says that any 3rd party is destined to fail, and at that point there won't be anything we can do about it.

Is he right, is he wrong? I don't know.

What are your opinions, is it better to use something developed inside the company, or do you prefer something like DevExpress, Infragistics, Krypton to name a few or is there something else even better that you would recommend instead?

I'd very much appreciate your thoughts, and experience on the matter.

Thank you in advance.

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9 Answers 9

up vote 4 down vote accepted

When shopping for 3rd party controls, look for the option to purchase source code (for a reasonable price). With source code you should be able to make any necessary changes to the components to keep them running well in your environment.

The Krypton Suite of controls from Component Factory does just this. Phil offers the source code for the entire suite for an amazing price (currently less than $400). I have used the Krypton Suite in my development for a year now and I have been extremely pleased with it. Krypton gives me the power to create shrink wrapped software with Office 2007 UI look and feel with consistency far beyond any other toolkit I tried. Phil is also very active in the support forums and provides you a direct link to the development path of the software.

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.NET3.5 SP1 is really matured to do ASP.NET and standalone UI development(WPF and Silverlight). What is your main criteria to go for third party components and frameworks. If you just need some charting or any other financial domain tools and control yeah you need to consider third party compoenents for a faster turnaround. Other than that I would see the .NET framework itself has rich libraries to do most of the things.

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I don't think it's entirely bad to rely on third parties. Some are very reputable and will do a great job of supporting you. But on the other hand, some are terrible to work with even if they stay in business. I don't know anything about the frameworks you've mentioned, though.

Have you considered an open source framework? That way you can still work on it yourself if all else fails. Of course, you have to take into account licensing requirements when doing this, but I think it's definitely something you should look into if it's appropriate for the project.

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I think when you buy third party controls you should think about the value you receive for the money you pay. There are dinosaur vendors like Telerik, Syncfusion, DevExpress, Infragistics which offer GUI with good quality and support, but they are not very cheap, because the brand costs money. There are other great WinForms suites coming from a small vendors such as ComponentFactory, DevComponents, VIBlend, Nevron which offer a good looking controls for WinForms in Office2007 style but much cheaper.

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As long as you have access to the source code of the library and are able to modify it and distribute the modified library without paying any royalties, your boss's fears are unfounded.

I'd go for DevExpress myself, but they are quite pricey when compared to the other frameworks.

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I think that your boss's concern could be better phrased as "One of these days we're gonna need to change the 3rd party control in a way that requires modifying it's source." Depending on the license that comes with the third party control, this might get sticky. For something like a UI control, in my experience .NET makes it pretty easy to make whatever it is you need anyway.

Maybe as a way to resolve the debate you could propose to knock out a quick prototype of whatever control(s) you'd otherwise need to borrow. That will give you insight as to (a) whether the third party library is needed and (b) what requirements you have of a third party library should you choose to go in that direction.

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The important thing to plan for when using 3rd party controls is continuity. If they do go under, what does that mean to you? How much are you relying on their framework, and how much work would it be to switch to something else? IS there something else that does what you need?

If you have source code for the component in question, it puts you in a much better position - you can at least fix bugs and possibly even maintain/extend it yourself. On the other end of the spectrum is tightly controlled software, where you have to renew every year and it expires if you don't. If you're using something like this, if they go under, it forces your hand, and you'll have to do something.

It's really a balancing act. Saving you work/money vs Probability of them disappearing vs Relying on a 3rd party.

I once had a boss that was like yours. The thing they miss is that you're entirely relying on 3rd party. If you're using .NET, you're trusting that Microsoft is not going to go under (probably not..), discontinue it (maybe), or radically change it (quite possible). Of course he's gone now, and we've since started using a handful of 3rd party controls (some open source) that have saved us hundreds of hours of dev time, or just let us do features we never would have done otherwise (because it would take too long).

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If your company makes U.I. then by all means develop and maintain your controls in house. If that is not your main business objective you should find a code vendor that offers source code for the control ( devexpress, telerik...) And when you implement these controls give your self a layer of abstraction so that it is simpler to switch vendors in the future.

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I disagree with the "layer of abstraction". It's good to see that it's possible to create adapter between current vendor and alternative implementation, but implementing another layer ahead of time is usually wasteful. –  Asaf R Sep 23 '08 at 17:05

Thank you very much for your insights. I've used Krypton myself but only the part that is free. I think it's more of a "We want it to look slick". I share my boss's concern with using 3rd party controls, but I also agree with you guys in that it's far better to concentrate on the task than on providing controls that look good.

The question the manager faced my boss with when he said that it's a bad idea to use Infragistics was "But can you do something similar in a reasonable amount of time ?". The answer was obviously "No".

I'll try suggesting Krypton Toolkit, I've used it a bit in the past as I've said before, I did have some trouble with it. I think the datagrid is the main focus of the problem, since most of the toolkits have options for customizing the appearence.

Again, thanks so much for your answers.

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