By no means am I slamming anyone's work, but some things that make life easier aren't worth the money. I am just trying to get a general idea of what people buy with their limited budgets, nowadays. I have yet to purchase anything other than the msdn enterprise
7 subscription. I am looking to spend some money on things to make life easier. I have been checking out reviews here and at asp.netPro. I am just asking for some of your opinions. What do you folks think is worth your valuable budget money and why? For those
who don't know, the MSDN enterprise subscription includes Visual Studio.net, SQL2k, Exchange 2k, all the Operating Systems, and much more. Thanks for your time and opinions, can't wait to see what you say. Chris
Well, it's really depend on what features you need for your application that you would rather not design it yourself. For example, major component/software such PDF Writer and Crystal Report are worth having. These softwares have become industry standard and
reliable enough to be used within my application. Other than that, I have always shy away from using third-party vendor custom control (those which did not come as part of the dotNet framework). These controls require too much investment (in money/time/effort)
and the concern is that they do not keep up the constant changes in technology. I have inherited projects to maintain which use third-party controls and those have made my life very difficult.
Our company is a component vendor, but I also use a few other components. It depends on what feature you really need and your analysis at that time of what is available on the market vs. what it would take to do the task yourself. It also depends on how specialized
your need is. Well written components can cover a wide range of requirements, but I don't think any component can suit every purpose under the sun. So, context is needed. Without it, it is hard to say, "this is worth having". One person will say component
XYZ is not worth the selling price and another will say XYZ is extremely affordable and pays for itself many times over. I've seen this myself at our own trade show booth. It's always a matter of context. We were fortunate to hit pretty close to the mark.
We have the same price and licensing agreement that we announced back in November 2001. I disagree with the notion presented in the earlier post that 3rd party developers are not keeping up with technology. After all, just developing for ASP.NET *IS* one indication
of a willingness to keep up with technology. For our part, we pick the most relevant technologies worth keeping up with. Regards, Joseph King Coalesys, Inc.
http://www.coalesys.com/
There are a few components I have discovered of late which are cutting down my development time and also providing my clients with features I would not be able to provide on my own. Funny enough, one of them is Coalesys' (see post above, http://www.coalesys.com)
Web Menu for .NET. Very useful for Dynamic menus in a web page, and my clients love it. It's rather expensive for a development license, but you only have to buy the license and then you may use it as much as you like. Another component I have been using is
Advanced Intellect's aspNetEmail component (http://www.aspnetemail.com). It's a very well put together email component that supports adding fields from a database to a templated email. Very useful when sending out hundreds or thousands of emails which you
would like customized for each customer. And finally, the one all my clients love -- the RichTextBox (http://www.richtextbox.com). Two great examples of how this can be used. The first is I use it for a client who sends regular emails to his customers and
constantly wants to tweak the emails. I store the text in a database which he edits with the RichTextBox. Combined with the aspNetEmail component above, he can add custom "code" to the email text which will grab the customer's name or whatever other pertinent
information from the database as it sends out the emails. I also use RichTextBox for a magazine site I built so that they may edit all of their articles as they put them on the site. They love it! Those would be my top 3 right now. Absolutely worth the money....especially
when the client pays for it. :0)
The Infragistics NetAdvantage suite - this one is SWEET. A ton of components for WinForms AND WebForms, and the price, even with a subscription, is really worth it. Nothing against the calesys.com web menu, but for double the price I get a TON more components,
including a REALLY good data grid for websites from infragistics.
If your a doing >anything< with email, go buy AspNetEmail. My company has pretty much dumped the System.Web.Mail namespace and now any email that needs to be sent from a web page uses that component. Its super fast and has a >ton< of features and is amazingly
inexpensive. For example, I send a newsletter out to about 1400 people a couple of times a month. Using the free, web-based bulk mailer sample app they provide, I can send them out in about 5-10 seconds. Plus you can send multi-part MIME emails, send email
asynch, send entire web pages, do mail merges and a ton of ither things. I highly recommed getting this. devin
I agree with Devin on AspNetEmail (http://www.aspnetemail.com). It blows away System.Web.Mail. Their support is good, and they are more than helpful. I also like AspNetMenu (http://www.aspnetmenu.com/home.aspx)
by Cyberakt, and today I purchased their new product, Rich Content Rotator (http://www.richcontentrotator.com/home.aspx). I have been extremely pleased with their customer service and support. They
contacted me with their thanks for purchasing the Rich Content Rotator and a bonus offer that took me by surprise. They definitely have a loyal customer now! I also have purchased the CliqueSite RichText component (http://richtext.cliquesite.com/)
which I have just started using briefly. I have not gotten to the part of my application that will be using that just yet, but I played with it briefly and it looks great. It seems to produce much better html than some of the other richtext controls. Since
I purchased 1.0 recently, I was given a free upgrade to version 1.1 which I appreciated. Again, customer service has been great here too.
Menus: In my opinion after having used both Cyberakt's aspnetmenu and Coalesys's webmenu, Coalesys is hands down the better offering and the customer service has been great. aspnetmenu is easy to configure and looks good, but my biggest problem with aspnetmenu
is that it is not cross browser/ cross platform. Coalesys looks good, is easy to configure and is truely cross browser / cross platform. I lamented over this menu thing for ages and I have been more than a little dissappointed in Cyberakt's slow development
to get their menu working on IE 5 for Mac. Mac's only represent about 3 - 5% of the surfers that come to my sites, but most customers are unwilling to let that customer get away. FTP Component: I have also just implemented an FTP component to homogenize a
customers approach to file sharing for huge files. http://www.Dart.com makes a great component with excellent examples. I know most of us are a little wary of FTP on our webservers (and for good reason) but this component is very nice and now works with https.
I bought aspnetmenu and am very happy with it. Also, I have found Cyberakt's support for this product to be outstanding. I have a large web application with several layers of menus and needed a way to personalize menus to user security profiles. So I put all
my menu data into a SQL Server 2000 table and use aspnetmenu to generate all my menus programmatically. Now, if I want to add, change, delete or rename menu items or change menu organization, I just update my database and my application menus change automatically.
It's saving me a ton of time on web application maintenance.
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