I love finding new cool feature rich 3rd party components that give my apps great look and feel. During the past six years I’ve tried a bunch of them. Back when I was a consultant this was a breeze. Find a component, pay for it, problem solved. But now when I’m working for an ISV and actually have to maintain the software we build, we suddenly came across this huge problem (or challenge for the consultants out there).

We have two packages from two of the most famous .Net component vendors out there. We bought these about 3 years ago and come to think of it, it’s no secret that the components come from Infragistics and DevExpress. In the beginning we where upgrading when new versions came along, but as the time went by the upgrade frequency dropped. So now it’s little over a year since our last component upgrade and quite a few things have happened since then.

At the time of writing I’m planning how we are going to migrate from .Net Framework 1.1 to 2.0 and that’s when these problems came to light. I’m not very keen on running our software in 2.0 and having our 3rd party components targeted for 1.1 running in 2.0. So the best thing to do is to upgrade the components as well. The only problem is that their API’s have changed and the migration toolkits they offer don’t really work that well. So know I’m sitting here trying to calculate the complexity of this migration (which was complex enough already), trying to figure out where we need to make changes in our code, how long it will take us, how much it will cost us to renew licenses, how happy our developer get when they hear about this plan and that I haven’t bought a single christmas gift yet! Right now it makes my head spin, so if anyone have any good recommendations on how to solve this little issue, please let me know!