The double edge sword of third party controls…
Published 2.16.2006 by ~mattg
Third party controls are a wonderful thing. When utilized properly, they can cut development times dramatically and provide some pretty nice functionality. They are not without their drawbacks. Unfortunately, I’ve run into two of those drawbacks this week.
The first came with the Infragistics controls we use for our web applications. They just released a new version of their controls, and since I have the time, I downloaded and upgraded the apps. Of course, they introduced what I hope is a bug (and not a “design change”) in their web combo box controls. So now I’m sitting here, waiting for them to tell me whether or not it’s a bug, and what the workaround will be.
Next was some of the socket controls used in our Win app (VC++). Apparently they are used in some of our managed to unmanaged dll’s (which the web apps used). Now, I ran into this problem when trying to build our main app. So one of the other developers had me install the socket controls on my machine. Viola, the main app built, but my machine had the dll files on it. I forgot this.
Then yesterday we were trying to get our web apps to build on the build machine. We kept getting the following error: “The specified module could not be found.” That’s it. No module name, nothing. So after pulling my hair out, I finally thought I might try to uninstall all the dev components I have and see what happens. And behold, I was getting the same error. So I finally was able to put that problem to rest.
So use caution when implementing third party controls in your app.
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