ASP.NET RAD Controls in an Enterprise Level App

Question

Ive always been against RAD controls because I wanted to do everything grammatically in the code, but I need my projects to speed up. I recently downloaded a project that used a layered architecture and had a ObjectDataSource control in the presentation page. I was accessing types in the DAL and didn't have a connection string in it, so it seemed like a good option even for a layered app. Is it totally frowned upon to use these types of controls in an enterprise level app?

Answer 1

The .NET Toolbox controls what make the .NET technology attractive for development in any domain, either it's web or desktop applications. These controls were made to increase the developer's productivity, and avoid them waisting time doing repetitive tasks such as creating UI controls. With that said they will allow you to create applications faster.

As long as you don't abuse of view state and avoid nasty implementations of the server controls you can create a reliable and cost effective application.

Also, assuming that you have a business logic layer that is on top of your DAL I don't see a problem with using data source controls, such as the object data source. Also investigating which are the best practices when using this type of control is a good place to start, just to play safe.

Answer 2

No its definately not frowned upon. Historically controls bundled with an IDE are pretty straight forward basic controls that generally just wrap the system controls (windowed controls in winforms and html controls in asp.net) with additional useful controls for various GUI and Data presentation.

These controls are generally lightweight in that they use the core framework, and can be extended easily. We have used various 3rd party components and in a lot of cases have reveted back to using modified/extended core asp.net controls with jQuery to produce controls with less overhead.