WinForm custom controls: now or later?

Answer 1

Since this is your first project, I tend to agree with your friend. While there is nothing inherently wrong with starting with third party controls, you will find that there is much more documentation and help available for the built in controls. In your early development efforts, you will likely hit many stumbling blocks, regardless of the choices that you make. Therefore, starting out with the most well-travelled course may make things easier for you starting out.

Once you have a little more experience debugging some of the issues that you will inevitably experience while learning a GUI framework, then it would make more sense to start bringing in glitzy third party controls.

Answer 2

Never written a program? I would not advise using any third party libs at this point, you are still learning. If you want the benefit of custom controls, why not write them yourself? You get the custom behavior and you actually learn how this stuff works.

Also, this statement is a bit of a red flag:

-If it matters, I don't know exactly how to do it yet but I do plan to try to keep the logic and the UI as separate as I possibly can. I know that needs to be a priority.

Design patterns are great, but until you get some experience it is hard to understand why they are so great. Start like everyone else writing 'bad' code and then come back to the design patterns. That way you will truly realize why they are so important (rather than just being told that they are). Don't try to grok the advanced stuff before being full competent with the fundamentals.

Answer 3

It depends on some factors:

• The complexity: a simple custom-draw control can easily replace the standard winform control but generally custom controls add new features and tend to have differents methods and properties. In this case, switching to the custom control is not a simple task.

• Your experience: Since you are pretty new to this, using a custom control can add another level of difficulty. Generally, these controls offers more options than the winform controls. So, it would be wise to start with the simple winform controls.

Answer 4

Just use the standard controls. Keep it simple, Keep it simple, keep it simple. Also know that if you are still programming next year (hopefully on other projects), you will look back at this code in shame -- but that is a good thing.