Recently I had an opportunity during some months to evaluate Devexpress eXpressApp Framework. Here are some my thoughts.
1. It is very easy to build a prototype, especially by one developer.
2. It is easy to impress bosses and your customers with the nice look-and-feel interface and out-of-box features.
3. It is tight Visual Studio - integrated framework and it brings to you (and to your team) some feeling of reliability and comfort.
4. But ... it is huge headache for the entire team to work with all design features (forms, action buttons, lists etc.) in the single .XAFML file!!!
Decades of development taught developers to split user interface (UI) and software logic apart. Then almost all IDEs were built with a idea to separate UI in small files, it helps a lot when you have more then one UI designer/programmer. But Devexpress decided to put all application UI into a single file! Thats really some kind of stupid way to help software developer teams to split UI tasks... Now eXpressApp Framework developers have to merge their local .XAFML files (actually big XML file) with other developers. In my experience this "Devexpress progressive approach" caused lost many UI works during the entire period of development process. The way how Visual Studio 2010 merges XAFML files and then eXpressApp Framework builds the application is a real nightmare: some XML chunks are thrown away of XAFML file and your team has to loose time to reconstruct the UI...
The Devexpress docs say that you can split the solution by multiple purpose-driven projects and edit UI in XAFML in each of them. But still there are some features (splitters for example) that can be used only in the main .XAFML (startup .EXE file). That is very sad :-(
So we don't have the solution for eXpressApp Framework UI merges yet. I hope that others who use Qt, Witty, ffead or Dijango can avoid that problem.
1. It is very easy to build a prototype, especially by one developer.
2. It is easy to impress bosses and your customers with the nice look-and-feel interface and out-of-box features.
3. It is tight Visual Studio - integrated framework and it brings to you (and to your team) some feeling of reliability and comfort.
4. But ... it is huge headache for the entire team to work with all design features (forms, action buttons, lists etc.) in the single .XAFML file!!!
Decades of development taught developers to split user interface (UI) and software logic apart. Then almost all IDEs were built with a idea to separate UI in small files, it helps a lot when you have more then one UI designer/programmer. But Devexpress decided to put all application UI into a single file! Thats really some kind of stupid way to help software developer teams to split UI tasks... Now eXpressApp Framework developers have to merge their local .XAFML files (actually big XML file) with other developers. In my experience this "Devexpress progressive approach" caused lost many UI works during the entire period of development process. The way how Visual Studio 2010 merges XAFML files and then eXpressApp Framework builds the application is a real nightmare: some XML chunks are thrown away of XAFML file and your team has to loose time to reconstruct the UI...
The Devexpress docs say that you can split the solution by multiple purpose-driven projects and edit UI in XAFML in each of them. But still there are some features (splitters for example) that can be used only in the main .XAFML (startup .EXE file). That is very sad :-(
So we don't have the solution for eXpressApp Framework UI merges yet. I hope that others who use Qt, Witty, ffead or Dijango can avoid that problem.