UI design using third party controls

[greatchap]

Hello Everyone,

I hope all of you had a great new year. Now its back to work for most of us. ;)

I make financial/stock market related product. It consists of charting and related tools. Thus it is a business application.

Most of previous versions were made in legacy vb, with one being made in VB6. It was relatively robust with simple but friendly user interface. Then our last product was made in vb 2005 (.net) and it had few issues. It was not developed by me, so other guys made a mess of the UI. The application was slow, buggy and not at all user friendly.

Now a new version needs to be developed and I am back in action. The tools that I have at my disposal are VS 2008, VS 2005 & VB6. The area to focus is User Interface which should be good and friendly, robust coding and responsive application.

I want to initially focus on ui design and want the interface to appeal to the user. Thus I came across a third party control suite called Telerik Rad Controls for Winforms. Telerik controls can be used in VS 2005 or VS 2008 and it enhances the look and feel of the application. They have over 40 controls including their own form.

Well actually I am now in a catch 22 situation. If I use third party controls (like telerik) then though my user interface becomes prettier but the loading of application slow down. Moreover forms where those controls etc are used are also a bit slow to load. If I use standard .net controls then its like my previous application but I can use the .net controls in a better way and make a friendly user interface. Here most thing are standard and speed is okay (normal .net). If I use VB6 (I know you guys must be thinking this is crazy) then I provide a legacy windows UI but provide an application with will be undoubtly faster than .net applications.

Making a decision now is getting tough. Even if I dont think of VB6 for now, then what do you guys say ? Should I go with third party controls and make a good gui but make application slow or should I use .net standard functionality and give my best shot.

Any ideas / advices from you people would be helpful.

Thanks,

Cheers,
Gr

[Jenner]

I don't think you'll be loosing much speed with .NET. I've written action games and time sensitive industrial applications with it and never had a speed issue.

[mendhak]

You could either go ahead and purchase the suite and use it (as Jenner said, you won't face a lot of speed issues unless they wrote some really bad code; since they want you to buy their software, they will not do so on purpose and will put it through QA); or you can take the time out and spend time on recreating the UI to un-buggify it.

The case for buying third party controls to do this is that "Hey, your company would have made you spend x days redoing this and making it really good, and end up paying you $ABC... but for less money than $ABC, you could buy all these controls and have your app ready in less time!"

In either case, it's still just another library. Whether you use the gridview here or gridview there, it's still another library you're choosing.

[MrNorth]

I have a bad story about the company Infragistics. We purchased their advanced grids for asp.net, and had nothing but trouble. Extremly buggy controls, and awful to work with for many reasons, one is that they didn't inherit from framework baseclasses. They where completely hand made from scratch... gaah. But this was many years ago and I guess the componets of today are much better. The latest I worked with are called Janus, and are abunch of advanced grids. Worked nicely.

But don't use 3rd party controls just because they look fancy and promise high heavens. There is a learning curve... and it cost money. Use them only if you need to solve a specific problem that is impossible or takes too long to do with regular asp.net controls. With the janus, we needed the timeline grid. Would take too long to to design it by ourselves. It was an app used by a radio company to plan their on air programs and schedules. Worked nicely and saved us lots of time.

cheers
Henrik

[mendhak]

But this was many years ago and I guess the componets of today are much better.

They sure are... this may have been before I joined or after I left, but definitely not while I was there. :p

[MrNorth]

Mendhak, this was in 2003 I think.

kind regards
Henrik

[greatchap]

I also heard about Janus controls. I tried their demo yesterday. It seemed better than telerik at least performance wise. They may not have as many controls as telerik does but I guess speed wise they are better. Moreover their only UI control suit (trial setup) is 27 MB in size while compared to Telerik's over 100 MB.

Hmm.. still not clear, should I still try my hands on third party or use .net standard controls. Though standard controls .net gives is enough and I am not using third party as i need extra controls. I though third party will enhance the UI of the application.