AskTog: Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On LineAskTog: Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line: A great article from Tog. He even hits my favorite Ticketmaster - I will do anything to avoid buying from Tickmaster because of the pain of using their site and the outrageous surcharges they add for no reason.
Thanks for all the feedback. Several people pointed to Genghis (which has its new home on
GotDotNet), I know it well and it has provided us with a few useful code fragments. (BTW it currently appears stalled - no new code since July 03).
My underlying point was that MS should be building these parts into the framework. Any time we find code from a 3rd party that we want to incorporate into our product, we must review it, test it and possibly make fixes. This all takes time.
In addition many of the solutions to the problems I've mentioned require full-trust (specifically XP-theming). We're writing a client for deployment over the internet. Its
low-trust or bust for us.
If MS had included these common components in the first place, I would be doing real work and not backfilling their holes.
BTW I beginning to sound like a bit of a whiner. I think .NET is pretty good for a first generation product. It appears that ASP .NET is really well done. But on the Win Forms, web client/smart client side of things .NET comes up just short of the mark and so I spend time fixing that. I'm really hoping that some of these blog entries catch the eye of people at MS and the holes start to get filled.