Build vs Buy - Reporting

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Build vs Buy - Reporting

Here's a good example of where build vs buy kicks in: One of the developers I'm mentoring was tasked with writing a summary report that had 3 groupings.

Since the company currently has no reporting software, the poor junior developer was trying to have a datagrid in a datagrid in a datalist and juggle the sub querying and binding of all 3 at runtime. At the rate things were going he had already spent more than a day on a report that a decent tool could have whipped up in less than a few hours.

We can't have that, so I had the company buy a few licenses of XtraReports Suite which should be arriving today. I'll blog my experiences with the product soon. I've played with the product before with some success, but I'm interested to see how the junior developers react to it.

Either way though, this solution shouldn't have the maintainability nightmare that was being worked on before. =)

Print posted @ Thursday, May 26, 2005 10:05 AM

Feedback

# re: Build vs Buy - Reporting

hmmm...why are you calling your developer a newbie?

5/26/2005 11:08 AM |

# re: Build vs Buy - Reporting

I've edited the post to use the more politically correct term "Junior Developer". Newbie slipped in there because he has all of 45 days of total programming experience.

I wasn't disrespecting him at all, just trying to point out that by not having tools available for a labor intensive task and assigning the task to someone who wouldn't know said tools exist can lead to some pretty unproductive labor.

Reminds me of another issue I have to deal with- keeping other people in the organization from giving my guys work without going through me first.

5/26/2005 11:15 AM |

# re: Build vs Buy - Reporting

I for one would interested in your experiences with XtraReports. We've used Active Reports .NET since release and can't say enough good things about it. But as always, I've got an eye out. I "studied" XtraReports on the DevExpress site, but never trialed it. If you have any experience with Active Reports, I be interested in a comparison. ;-)

Also, with your junior (newbie); is he using VB.NET or C#? I'd be curious about his first takes on .NET as a complete beginner.

5/26/2005 12:35 PM |

# re: Build vs Buy - Reporting

I have used Active Reports and it's a great product. However the employer here wanted several licenses and the Active Reports was out of the price range.

The biggest challenges for the junior developer (vb.net) so far have been:

1. Not reinventing the wheel- This just requires more experience with the framework.

2. Getting accustomed to OO concepts.

Other than that he really loves visual studio as a dev environment and he is coming along nicely.

5/26/2005 12:55 PM |

# re: Build vs Buy - Reporting

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