Running a WPF project. Build your own control or buy?
I am starting a WPF project that is going to be quite complex in complexity and will use a lot of modern user interfaces like overview pane, grids, tabs, etc ... I looked at the market and there aren't too many control sets out there. Some of the available ones are either Beta or CTP. Others don't look overly polished. Others look pretty pretty.
At this moment, today, should I buy or, bite the bullet and build my own? What are the experiences people have with 1st generation backbones?
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It should be remembered that WPF is very different from WinForms, you can do amazing things by only buying redesigns of existing controls when you start your first WPF project that you don't yet understand WPF and don't know about the system's features and pitfalls.
I suggest you start developing your project without these controls and add them later, that way, when you start adding these controls, you have a better understanding of which controls you need and which controls are a trivial customization of an existing control.
If you need something that isn't trivial, it's best to buy - but only if the component you're buying is good, so evaluate carefully.
and read Joel's "In Defense of the Not-Inventable-Here Syndrome" at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
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One of the best things about WPF (and XAML in general) is that it makes it easy to customize the available controls much faster than in the WinForms days. It all depends on the level of customization you need. If you just need to customize the look of the standard controls, you can do so with a tool like Expression Blend and you don't need any third-party material. If you have a good designer on your team (or if you yourself) this shouldn't be a problem. And if you need some advanced functionality that is not provided by the standard controls, I would recommend trying to customize the standard controls. It's really amazing how much you can change the look and feel of a control in WPF by changing things like the ControlTemplate.DataTemplate etc. And / or subclassing. Also - this is just a personal opinion now - depending on third party custom controls tends to suck ...
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One of the questions I always ask myself is "what are we doing in business?" I ask for this especially when I am about to do something that is time consuming rather than buying a third party solution.
Are you in the business of creating third party controls? Or does it make more financial sense to buy a package and save precious time for other things?
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I'd say to see he's already there. From my point of view, I am pretty much covered by the available ones, and especially in .NET 4 where DataGridView, Calendar and DateTimePicker are included (finally).
But if you also want to take a look at the components of the Infragistics company. They're very powerful, but the documentation really sucks!
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