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all of your problems, or you have been disappointed when you couldn't find one. Often, when you found a control, it failed you in some way. The third-party tool market, though imperfect, has matured over the years. Today, probably not even a handful of low-level programming problems haven't been encapsulated in some control on the market. |
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It's widely known in the software development community that with Visual Basic, Microsoft single-handedly brought the third-party control industry to the forefront of the mass market. Specifically, the Visual Basic Extensions (VBX) control market brought the buying and selling of third-party controls to a level of reality that was unprecedented. Whenever you read about the history of third-party controls and components in programming magazines and books or hear about it in seminars, you typically discover that VBX controls were at the beginning of it all. Therefore, when it comes to making decisions about acquiring and implementing third-party controls, Visual Basic developers, in general, have the most experience. |
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There are advantages and disadvantages in deciding to acquire third-party controls. The advantages are decreased development time (and therefore reduced development costs) and reuse over many projects. Buying a third-party control is like buying canned labor; that is, the third-party vendor has put its labor force's time and energy into that control so that you don't have to put your time and energy into reproducing the same code. What's more, you can reuse that canned time and energy over many projects, thus gaining increased returns on investment over time. However, there are the disadvantages. |
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With the proliferation of VBX, OCX, and now ActiveX controls over the years, Visual Basic developers have experienced a wide range of negative side effects. Many controls were poorly documented, rendering the controls almost useless. Other controls were awkward or required too many function calls and declarations, making development and maintenance tasks almost as painful as developing the code yourself. Some vendor technical support staffs were overwhelmed with calls and emails so that it was difficult to reach them for help. As if that were not bad enough, some vendors took the money and ran after releasing a first version, leaving you to wonder whether they were under investigation by a television news magazine or the government. More than a few vendors went bankrupt. |
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Because the disadvantages became so rampant in the third-party control market, many individual programmers and organizations sought better ways of incorporating these still useful controls. Some of the ways include the following: |
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Creating the component committee |
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Formulating an evaluation and selection criteria |
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Pricing components versus in-house component development |
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