Third-Party Components
Given the timesaving benefits related to using third-party components, we decided early on to purchase a number of .NET components. We had a limited time to work on this rewrite project so it made sense to focus on the simulation engine code that represents the core of Micro Saint Sharp, rather than focus on features such as the menu.
While researching which tools to use, I found that most companies offered very good support. We decided to purchase the GoDiagram graph-drawing tool (see Figure 1) from Northwoods Software (www.nwoods.com). We had numerous questions for them and found that they usually responded quickly; often within only a few hours. They were much cheaper than some of their competitors and were royalty free for deployment. (All of the vendors we chose offered royalty-free licensing.)
We bought a C# editing component and a docking layout control from Actipro Software (www.actiprosoftware.com). If this tool had not existed, we would most likely still be using a text box to define C# code. Now we have several of the text-editing features of a modern IDE to help modelers create their code.
Doing the research for available tools and looking at their relative prices was worth our time. Again, there is no way we could have the full capability of the tools that our vendors are providing if I had done the programming myself. We have also gotten benefit over time from the component updates, giving us many new features that we can pass along to our users with limited work on our part.