Everyone, 3rd Party Controls

[James Stanich]

Finally am getting the company to come off some coin to purchase 3rd party controls. Any suggestions of which are the better ones? Right now I am looking for a fully flexible grid, color columns, hierchy, stuff like that...

Any suggestions?

Dude, my suggestion is to stick to Microsoft stuff!

There are probably some very good third party controls out there but there are some crap ones too and there are definitely some a**hole software houses out there. My experience is bitter regarding third party controls, the support is often poor or non-existent.

Our team once inherited a project which had a number of controls in it no longer supported by the third party developer, but he was happy to sell us the C source code, hmmmmm......

I could tell you some more horror stories. Our policy is no third party controls. I would look carefully at whether you can create the functionality yourself by writing your own ActiveX control.

I am very bitter about third party controls, can you tell?

[James Stanich]

i appreciate you candidness, but for example, I was looking for a Outlook style function bar (the one on the left). Does Microsoft offer these ocx's for the end programmers, like us? It would be nice if these controls were part of VB, or could be purchased from Microsoft. Someone mentioned using Microsoft automation to achieve, but, conviently, I cannot find the documentation to achieve this...

Any other thoughts on 3rd party controls?

James

In my travels I came across a product called Activebar from http://www.datadynamics.com

It looks OK. I don't know them and have nothing to do with them. It is in a project I inherited for maintenance. I will exterminate it!!

To the best of my knowledge MS don't offer it yet but my bet is the control we want will be in the next VB service pack, if not, then definitely in VB7.

[Edited by MadWorm on 11-21-2000 at 12:13 AM]

For all the outlook-style controls, have a look at the ProtoView suite. I don't actually own it, but when I looked at it, the docs seemed better than most (which is not necessarily saying much), and the controls themsleves seem to have been implemented reasonably. There are tons of grids out there, but in my opinion, none are really worth purchasing over the ones you get in vb anyway.

- gaffa

[faisalkm]

For a fullfledged flexigrid control i think u can use videosoft Vsflexigrid control. I wish i could make one like that may be more better.

Look here for many nice controls (incl. source code)

http://www.vbaccelerator.com