DallasCodeCamp - third party controls discussion
During the DallasCodeCamp this past Saturday, a lot of the presenters were having a discussion regarding third party controls and I want to go on the record and clarify that I hope I didn't sound totally against third party controls.
I am definitely for utilizing off the shelf products to increase productivity and delivery schedules, but I always do so with caution.
From experience, I have seen too many projects have their hands tied from moving forward with some other core system update (VB3, to VB4, to VB6, to .NET 1.0/1.1 and .NET 2.0). If your project is too dependent on third party controls to deliver it's functionality then you have to wait for the component provider to provide an upgrade path.
The main thing that any software development team has to be aware of and provide full disclosure to whomever controls the budget is the need for keeping the third party controls updated with their versioning life cycles.
Microsoft has made it a lot easier for these component vendors to keep their products updated to the latest frameworks by providing ever earlier looks into the upcoming frameworks. So this concern is not as worrisome as it used to be.
The real moral to the story, if you are using off the shelf products, you more than likely should consider investing in their subscription models in order to keep your products up todate or at least be willing to buy the upgrades necessary to keep your applications on the modern frameworks.
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.