Generally when designing a software product, I have to weight the pros and cons of rolling my own code for everything, or strategically using control libraries for key parts of the code. A couple years ago, I decided that for the front-end GUI in my .NET apps, I’d use the Winform controls from DevExpress. Generally, this has worked fairly well. As with working with any control library, there’s little quirks that I have to get used to. This control library likes to put most of their functionality under a “Properties” parent property… That’s one of the key things to remember when working with their controls…
Today these quirks with DevExpress’s XtraScheduler control exceeded annoying and went into downright frustrating. I was trying to setup a timeline view to span midnight(some customers of my Employee Scheduling Software will have operating hours that go unto the wee hours of the morning). To do this, I had to create a custom TimelineScale object. This makes sense, but the names of the methods and the logic that I have to implement in them just doesn’t make sense to me… And the documentation on these properties is obscure at best… I finally got things working after a lot of messing around, and I’m glad to finally have it behind me. Overall, I think using the scheduler control will probably provide useful eye candy to the software while keeping me from having to re-invent the wheel.