Migrating from Stingray Objective Toolkit

Question

We have a collection of commercial MFC/C++ applications which we sell using Stingray Objective Toolkit, we have source code license and have ported it in the past to Solaris/IRIX/HP-UX/AIX using Bristol Technologies WindU (Windows API on UNIX, including MFC).

Any long story short recently about 18 months ago we ported Stingray to Win64, but a long a tedious task, during this time I did some research on commercial and open source alternative MFC extension libraries things like Ultimate Toolbox and Prof-UIS.

• Has anyone else used Stingray and moved to an alternative?
• If so which one would you suggest?
• What were the main perils of the move?

Answer 1

Yes, we haved moved away from Stingray. It depends on what Stingray components you are using. For the grid control, you can use the free MFC gridcontrol from www.codeproject.com or the commercial one from http://www.bcgsoft.com/. The free one is OK but development has stalled, so no modern UI rendering etc.

The 'layout editor' Stingray component can be replaced by the one from bcgsoft.com, but I don't have experience with that - we rewrote the functionality we needed from that on our own (it was only a subset of what Stingray provided).

As for alternative MFC toolboxes, I suggest bcgsoft because part of their toolbox is in the Visual Studio Feature Pack so it's free and fits very well with VS. I have looked at Ultimate Toolbox (stay away from it, stale code that isn't updated anymore) and Prof-UIs (OK but I found it not so easy to integrate).

Now that BCG is part of the 'official' MFC I don't see a reason to choose something else than BCG (except for maybe the cost, if you need a free alternative you can look at codeproject).

Answer 2

I have limited experience with Stingray.

However, I want to suggest trying CodeJock's Xtreme Toolkit Pro (http://www.codejock.com). Its GUI is very good and its supported very well.

Answer 3

I have been using Stingray for last eight years or so, and have looked at moving off it a couple of times. So far, I've decided against, principally because I have ported a version to Windows CE & Mobile and don't see much else giving the same solution on this platform. While Stingray isn't perfect, they have now got a 64bit version, and it's a pretty stable product.

What I am doing, is replacing the very weak areas of Stingray, such as the XML support, with alternatives. In this case I went with Expat for performance reasons.

The perils of moving? You could go from something stable but old fashioned to pretty but flakey ;) In my case, I would also kill a fair number of my automated test scripts that work at GUI level.

Edit: Just to add a bit to the above, I moved from VS2003 to VS2008 this week and at the same time Objective Studio 2006 v2 to Objective Studio 10.1. The transition was pretty seamless, with one minor glitch that was promptly handled by RogueWave tech support. Even this would have gone unnoticed if we didn't have a very extensive GUI regression test suite. IMO, Stingray is a very mature, well supported, feature rich and most importantly stable product. I for won't be moving of it any time soon without very good reason.