Money Grubbing Bastards

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Charting components are way too expensive. You basically have one of two options: purchase a half-baked, lousy component that produces charts designed by your local elementry school's brightest, or shell out an endless revenue stream to the money grubbing bastards at Software FX or Dundas. Well, of course, this is only if you are creating an ASP.NET app. If you are creating a Windows Forms app, our friends at Software FX will give you a license to redistribute the code on a royalty free basis. But this doesn't apply to web apps for some strange reason... you need to dish out cash every time you sell your product. This is utter nonsense (especially considering that each license costs $1500 before any OEM deals)...

Of course, this is what is wrong with the 3rd party component industry these days. If it wasn't for the high prices and low quality of American made components, maybe we wouldn't have to ship our jobs off to India...

Update from Thomas: The guys at Infragistics aren't money grubbing bastards. Checked out their license. Much cooler:

“Server-side components are licensed DEPLOYMENT FREE. You pay to use them in design time. You do not pay per-server deployment fees when you deploy your application.“

So, guess who's components I will be using. Not quite as pretty, but it does what I need it to do. :-).

Have you tried the Infragistics Suite? They have a pretty nice charting component, and I think it is ryalty free. The NetAdvantageSuitealso has a LOT more :-) And the price is relatively low.

Thomas Tomiczek - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 4:27:00 PM

Always nice to be of help.

Some more good sides: we use Infragistics exclusively here - we may come up with some special helper classes for the EntityBroker2003.1 soonish :-) Gives you another performance boost then. At least the new databinding is thoroughly tested with them.

Thomas Tomiczek - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 5:22:00 PM

I've been using Infragistics for a few months for both WinForms and WebForms. I must say that I love the controls. Once you get used to the feel of the API, they're awesome.

David Stone - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 5:36:00 PM

I've been using Infragistics NetAdvantage w/ sub for a while and have had nothing but the best from them. The learning curve is moderately high, but once you get used to it they're great - very cool controls.

Tony Pino - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 5:39:00 PM

23779.. May I repost it? :)

weblogs.asp.net - Friday, June 10, 2011 11:08:10 AM

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