The art of creating a good control

What is a control (or component)

Do you remember the joy when you were playing lego in your young years ? With small lego parts you can build your most wanted star wars ship. You don't build the lego parts though, you buy them.

It's the same for software components, also called controls. They are well builded, polished piece of code solving a problem; and they can be easily plugged into your app. They bring you value, and if they fit your needs out of the box, or if you are a little weak on coding (lots of us are), they will save you a lot of time.

What makes a good control

A good control should:

• Bring a strong value to both the application and its developer
• Have a good documentation with a light learning curve
• Be fully tested and stable on multiple configurations and devices
• Be distributed through a package manager like nuget.org, and/or an extension to the development environment like the visual studio marketplace for visual studio windows/mac and vscode.
• Report usage or configuration problems in a descriptive way
• At least have an online support, by email or direct chat
• Have an easy to understand and relaxed licence plan, and optionally extended support plans
• Have a community version that can be used in open source projects, or for evaluation purposes

At Vapolia, i'm building components since a long time, both internal components that never surfaced in public (for customer projects), the award winning components XamSvg and WheelPicker, and some open source components among which KeyValueLite, XamarinFormsGesture and MvvmCross-UserInteraction which started as a fork and was fully rewritten and improved.

Where to find controls

There are a few top controls providers: syncfusion, telerik, grapecity, infragistics, all with tons of quite standard components like grids, calendars, and many others.