Out of the blind alley

Having had to clean up after my own and other people's software messes on many occassions, one of my fundamental programming rules is that Less Code is Good. That doesn't mean I like crazy app-in-one-line obfuscated perl scripting stupidity; I temper it with Simple is Good, which often means more code, as long as it's stupider, and so easier to understand. But generally I prefer components, libraries, etc, to buckets of code.

Along these lines, it's always my preference to use data-aware controls where they can be profitably used. So, in this spirit I jumped into Delphi .Net, swallowed the line that Falafel was putting out, and went for bdp and DBWeb components.

Well, they suck. I tried, I failed, and I'm willing to blaim anyone but myself, so I'm going to declare those components to be shit. They really suck, they would be fabulous for demos but you can't make real software out of them.

...

Anyway, I'm now using non-data aware methods, and they work just fine. Sad but true. Lots of code to write, unfortunately, but that's the way it goes. It's pretty straightforward code, so hey.