I've been using DotNet now since 2001 and before that I was an MFC fan; looking back I’ve only missed one thing, and that is having the source code to some of assemblies that I use, in particular the Windows Forms assembly! There's been so many times when, if I could have just stepped through the code I would have understood the behavior of Windows Forms much faster. MFC for all its unpleasantness was great for being able to understand by simply debugging into the code.

So what has brought this post on? Well last night I had fun and games trying to get a child control of our SuperList to stop keeping focus. The child control is our ribbon control that handles customisation options; whenever I clicked on it the focus would be lost from the parent (SuperList) and never returned. The only way to get focus back was to click away into another control and then click back again in the SuperList.

Initially I didn't know if the cause was Windows default behavior or some code buried inside Windows Forms. After lots of mucking around trying different approaches, I got out my trusty copy of Reflector, allowing me to peer into code of Windows Forms and find the offending area. Reflector if you don't already know decompiles the assembly into source code, it's not perfect but does an amazing job, it’s one of those tools you just have to have and it’s free.

In the end the solution was to change the super class of the ribbon from a UserControl to a ContainerControl. The UserControl had some fun code in its OnMouseDown that set focus to it when activated which I needed to stop. I wish Microsoft would release the Windows Forms assembly’s source code, I would make life a little easier for me. Microsoft have released some of the source code to the framework, why not more?

Rules For Third Party Components

This brings me to the rules that I have when considering using components especially from third parties in my projects:

Treat third party components like Candy

When I first started out programming in a commercial environment (VB3) I saw all these lovely controls I could use and I was like a boy in a candy shop! Then a year or two later Microsoft released VB 4. The company I worked for at the time was moving to it, and I had the unpleasant task of converting my candy filled project over. I had a nightmare finding new versions of the controls I had been using; even when I did find them they weren’t exactly the same. In the worst case scenario there wasn’t a “direct” replacement and I ended up having to rewrite sections of code. Moral of the story, Components are like Candy, there fine in extreme moderation but too much and they’ll rot your project :-)

Stick to out of the box components if possible

Leading on from my first rule, when I did convert my old VB3 project, the components I had less trouble with were the vender ones (Microsoft in this case). I figure the reason for this is they had legions of developers who could concentrate on making the upgrade process as painless as possible, whereas other components didn’t have that luxury.

Must have good support

The whole point of using someone else’s component is to make your life easier, so under this heading I lump good technical support, documentation, and examples. If your buying the control then is their support line any good? Do you get helpful answers to your questions or comments in a timely manner? If not I’d steer clear. If it’s a free component make sure it has a community who is willing to help.

Make sure you have access to the source code

Leading on from earlier, having the code makes life easier when trying to debug an issue; also if the component vender shuts up shop, at least you have the code in case you need to fix something. Some companies don’t give away their source with components, and actively work against you even being able to de-compile their component using an obfuscator; I tend to steer clear of these components and companies as much as possible!

Leading on from my last post about how we intend to start getting the "eye balls" on our new product, Neil Patel has written a very good post on using Digg and Netscape to draw traffic to your site. I'll certainly be making use of this information!

Our Vision

Why yet another RSS reader? To cut a long story short we thought we could write a better reader than the bunch currently out there. Our vision is to deliver the best RSS reading experience  by having a slick modern interface together with seamless synchronization across installations; and finally something that didn't look like another done-to-death outlook clone. I think we've achieved that and more :-)

We've spent nearly a year working on FG; all of the controls have been written from scratch with the exception of the IE control and the tree control ,the latter we are in the process of re-writing. This gives us the ability to "mould" the user interface specifically around the news reading experience.

How are we going to get the eye balls?

At the moment we have a a handful of users, and the product is still in beta stealth mode; we haven't shouted about the product yet as we wanted to get the feedback from our close friends getting the product right before moving to a public beta. Having said that if your reading this and are using FG, give us plenty of feedback :-)

So our current gameplan is to target the technical community first; we figured our initial approach would be to put one or more technical articles up on popular coding websites, and hopefully start an ever increasing buzz that will build up in a controlled way. This will give us the chance to test our systems and get wider feedback. We have other ideas as well which i will go into closer to the time.

How are you going to make your money?

We currently plan to offer a flat yearly subscription fee of $20 a year, whilst in beta it will be free to use. Subscribing will entitle the user to the use of all of our RSS reader products that we build (we only have the windows version at the moment). Yeah I know there are plenty of free RSS readers out there and Microsoft are releasing one built into IE not to mention Outlook, but we still think people are going to want a reader that's a cut above the rest. If Opera can survive in the midst of free browsers then i think we have a shot at it too.

Well like the title says, this is my first post! My name is Lee Alexander, co-founder of FeedGhost and in this blog I will post my musings that hopefully you'll find interesting.  I'd like to think of this as an online diary of the trials and tribulations of trying to start a company and hopefully make it successful..