I'm with you that a good baseline is very important and that some things should be in the box. Decent basic UI controls are among them and I for one concur that what's provided in V1.1 is not exactly up to baseline standards.

I think the issue behind that is that WinForms and especially the UI portion of that product (1.0) was less important and less worked out than the Web portion of .NET. It is surprising to me this wasn't addressed in the 1.1 release. But they are (supposedly) addressing this in V2.0 with a full compliment of more advanced controls.

But I think it's much more important that the platform is open enough so that you can easily extend it and Microsoft has done a fine job of this. You can build and extend fairly easily and this also opens up the opportunities for third party companies much more so than ActiveX did.

Integration of controls in .NET is a heck of a lot less work than it was with ActiveX too, so there's much less pain to use third party controls. In theory you don't even need to install anything - you ship an assembly for the controls and that's that. In reality they usually are installed in the GAC, but you don't have to. Version independence and local copies makes sure that your component can keep working even if newer versions get installed. All this is stuff that makes component use a heck of a lot more palatable and less painful than the crap you have to go through with ActiveX controls.

I've been the same way in my Fox apps where I dreaded having to use ActiveX controls. With .NET though I have no problem because it's much easier.

Overall I think that WinForms in V1 is an unfinished product. THe architecture is right, but the MS implementation of the platform is incompletely and ineffectually executed. The UI platform is slow and the controls lack common high level features. But this is likely to be addressed in Whidbey, although knowing Microsoft's record with UI I'm not holding my breath. I figure third party vendors have little to worry about...

Ultimately third party controls give you choices and that's always a good thing...

+++ Rick ---