Development toolkits

[mudskipper]

Do dev toolkits actually save money?

New clientCo is using DevExpress.

Initially looks very impressive - drag and drop coding to give desktop feel to web applications.

But as soon as you want to do something just slightly different, you end up breaking all the rules of OOP. Very heavy reliance on client-side js = slow. The controls themselves don't inherit from their natural .Net counterparts which seems a real shortcoming.

Still getting to grips with it, so may just be learning curve, but I wasted best part of a day trying to do something I could have coded from scratch in a couple of hours.

Jury's out here. Anyone else used it? What's the verdict?

[DimPrawn]

It's the usual build vs buy trade off.

If you stick to designing your systems to utilise the features offered by DevExpress, and make sure you don't try and make it do things it wasn't designed to do, then you can get software up and running very quickly.

Once you allow people to specify features in the software it doesn't easily support, it will take a long time to "bodge" around it and often gets broken when they release new versions.

I once worked on a system where almost none of the features specified were supported by the off the shelf package that had been approved to form the core of the systems. It turned out the reason it was chosen was because the IT Director was a female and she liked the colour of the screens.

Two years later, it still wouldn't do what they wanted it to do with customisation.