Next, let's ask ourselves the ever-important question? Buy, build or open source?

It would be my recommendation, and of course one reason why I'm writing this book, to expose yourself to the open source world. I realize that many developers suffer from the 'it's not built here' syndrome, but we should really be honest with ourselves before going down that path. Do we really think we have the expertise to do better, faster, and have it tested within our time constraints, compared to what is already out there? We should first try and see what is already out there that we can use. There are so many fabulous open source toolkits for us to use, and the developers of those have put tremendous amounts of hours and work into developing and testing them. Obviously open source is not a solution for everyone, every time, but even if you cannot use it in your application, there certainly is tremendous knowledge you can gain by using and experimenting with them.

Buying usually isn't an option. If you're lucky enough to find something to purchase, you probably won't get the approval as it will cost a pretty penny! And what happens if you need to modify the product to do something you need? Good luck getting access to the source or having the support team change their priorities just for you. Not going to happen, at least not as fast as we'll probably need it to!

And as for building it yourself, hey we're developers, it's what we all want to do, right? But before you fire up Visual Studio and take off, think long and hard about what you are getting into.

So open source should always be a first choice. You can bring it in house (assuming licensing allows you), adapt it to your standards if need be (code contacts, more unit tests, better documentation, and so on).