Hi all

What I'm getting at here is being presented with a control or framework that does 95% of what you want but has its shortcomings when opposed to learning how to do it yourself.

To give a good example (ASP.Net) UpdatePanel vs DIY JS/JSON. The UpdatePanel gives you AJAX instantly without doing anything additional, however I've come to learn that its shortcomings are mainly that it's a bit of a hack and performs badly on busy pages and I've found myself having to scrap UpdatePanels in favour of rolling my own JS, and I've now made it a habit to fully investigate any shortcomings in out-of-the-box solutions, as I've been stung by this experience.

So I guess what I'm asking is: Is it better to find out how to DIY or is it considered a better approach to try the available solution and risk going a full circle? Obviously I've only targetted a single control, but it is a very attractive control to people learning AJAX - I'm sure there are others out there.

Sorry if dupliate. Thanks