Review: Iron Speed Designer
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Published: 01 Jun 2005
Abstract
A walkthrough and review of a powerful Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool for ASP.NET, Iron Speed Designer.
by Steven Smith
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Introduction

Iron Speed Designer is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool developed by Iron Speed Inc. Unlike many similar products I’ve encountered and worked with, Iron Speed Designer has immense breadth and depth of coverage and details. It’s been my experience that a particular tool might be good at generating a data access layer, or providing some simple UI for managing the contents of a table. Another might have decent documentation or supporting samples and videos. One of the things that immediately struck me about Iron Speed’s product is that it includes all of these things in a single package. Their designer handles the data access layer as well as the user interface, and includes very detailed wizards, documentation, and even video walkthroughs.

In order to put the product through its paces, I constructed a simple link management administration site using the tool. This was a real-world requirement of mine, albeit a fairly simple one.


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User Comments

Title: Great customer satisfaction   
Name: Jason
Date: 12/30/2008 6:12:50 AM
Comment:
We have used Iron Speed for custom software development on several projects of various types and sizes. Our customers have been very pleased with our responsiveness as requirements change. The fact that our clients can ask us to make database and UI changes and have those implemented in hours instead of weeks is a major benefit. This allows the client to "play" with a version of the application to "test" the business process and get back to us immediately with changes. The speed at which we can generate a new version of the application and the resulting customer satisfaction would not be possible without Iron Speed.
Title: Program Engineer Yahoo!   
Name: Sirinivasan Ram
Date: 12/5/2008 8:05:24 PM
Comment:
I benn using IronSpeed for over a year now. Every thing work fine the software saved me a lot of time. The thing is you have to learn all the deatures and functiuon before blaming the software (IronSpeed Designer). Perfect Choice
Title: Nice UI too!   
Name: BestISDeveloper
Date: 11/6/2008 12:43:44 PM
Comment:
The best thing about the tool is that I don't have to worry about developing the user interface. This saves a lot of development time and all of my projects look very professional!
Title: I created 2 apps in about an hour   
Name: RADDevelop
Date: 11/6/2008 12:42:56 PM
Comment:
We were able to ramp up quickly using Iron Speed Designer. It’s the first RAD tool that I’ve ever seen that actually works (and I’ve looked at a lot in the past).
Title: Way better than hand-coding   
Name: KingCoder2
Date: 11/6/2008 12:42:06 PM
Comment:
This thing saves a lot of time. I just pointed it at my database and it gave me a fully working application in 5 minutes. It works really well when you have a normalized database with descent foreign key definitions – the better structured your database, the better app you’ll get. We built most of our custom CRM system using Iron Speed Designer which is used by all our sales reps.
Title: Iron Speed is awesome!   
Name: Jimi Jegonia
Date: 11/2/2008 7:19:20 AM
Comment:
One of the great decisions I ever made in my career is to shift from windows desktop
programming to web application development, from classic Visual Basic & VBA to C#.

It should have been a very painful paradigm shift without the versatility and awesome
power of Iron Speed Designer. I used it to generate parallel codes that truly accelerated my learning momentum and it constantly amaze me that only my imagination can limit its dominance.

High returns and happy programming life only happen if you have a tool like Iron Speed Designer that you know too well.
Title: Iron Speed allows code customizations   
Name: Jim Murphy
Date: 10/15/2008 8:48:11 AM
Comment:
Iron Speed is a great tool. The majority of the learning curve is learning OOP. Someone who is already familiar with developing web apps in .NET and who is solid on OOP will pick this tool up quickly. It is straight forward to add custom code that is saved even though you keep rebuild the app by means of overriding existing methods or handling events. Understanding the page lifecycle in .NET will help you make the right customization in the right override. Again, this is straight .NET for the most part.
All in all, this tool has saved my butt several times - by making 1 hour changes turn into 2 to 5 minutes. I have used this tools for several years and find that it is maturing nicely. I love it.
Title: Honest opinion   
Name: San5050
Date: 10/15/2008 7:41:13 AM
Comment:
There is a learning curve, I agree but the advantage of using it outweighs the learning curve a lot. Out of the box, it generates all the maintenance pages, and has packed with a lot of code customizations. For something you want to custom develop but not covered in the wizard, I'd strongly suggest tapping into the technical forum or contacting an IronSpeed MVP. That takes away a lot of hours trying to poke around. In all, this is a very good tool in my opinion; and it makes it even better when you start being better with it.
Title: Iron Speed Rocks!   
Name: Miles Gibson
Date: 10/14/2008 8:15:06 PM
Comment:
I love Iron Speed. It has revolutionized my web development consulting practice. I can do in days and weeks what takes others months and years. An out of the box solution that works and works well. You have to see it to believe it!
Title: Personal Opinion   
Name: Baljeet Matta
Date: 9/2/2008 10:26:37 AM
Comment:
IronSpeed accelerates application development with concentration on business logic(as it creates the basic pages), with features like ajax, advanced datagrid.Code clarity and modularity with documentation increases the effeciency and stylesheets give a stunning look to the application.Flexibility to work with any database, Inegration of Third-party tools, all these decrease response time for application. Pre implemented Advanced Security and Concurrency enables the application to work in multiuser environment.We have been working with IronSpeed since ver 4.3 and it is getting better and better with new features being added in each new version.
Title: My Personal Opinion   
Name: Adish
Date: 8/31/2008 5:23:22 AM
Comment:
This tool like any other, has a learning curve. Blaming the tool 'coz u haven't learnt it isn't the right thing to do.True,there are licensing issues, but you can't expect ReallyGood things for free. I have been using Iron Speed for over a year now, and it has turned out to be great value for money. A small investment has saved me lots of time (and money). More than that, my apps are now Robust and Bugs Free and time required for maintenance is now available for family! All my team members are so glad we work on IronSpeed.
Title: Personal Opinion   
Name: ISDSucks
Date: 6/23/2008 2:39:35 PM
Comment:
Ok, I'm really sick of all the rosy red reviews of Ironspeed. This program is garbage, that produces more garbage. Within Ironspeed, you cannot make any meaningful changes to the program, and outside of ironspeed, in Visual Studio, none of the controls will even load. If you have to make any sort of actual custom code/buttons/anything good luck with this 'Code generator'. It makes me sad to think that people are so hard up for cash that junk like this passes for a "Code Generator".
Title: Buyer Beware   
Name: btaplin
Date: 4/15/2008 2:06:06 PM
Comment:
Beware of their licensing policy. Iron Speed 'froze' my paid-for-license and won't unlock it until I buy a second license because I unknowningly breached their licensing. The license was only activated on one machine and only one user was using it at a time but since I am the 'licensed user' (although I don't develop with it) but someone else at my company does (who isn't the 'named user') and since I logged on to audit his work they are trying to soak me for more money. This has been the worst customer service experience I have ever had...bar none.
Title: Nice   
Name: A Maven
Date: 6/13/2007 6:05:25 AM
Comment:
This article is very nice to get started with this new tool
Title: Versions and Updates   
Name: Steven Smith
Date: 1/3/2007 10:40:03 AM
Comment:
Dragondevil - You're right, I should have included the version number in this review. I guess the article date is the best you can go from in this case, but it's definitely good feedback for future articles and reviews.
Title: Valuable info made more valuable?   
Name: dragondevil
Date: 1/3/2007 6:36:55 AM
Comment:
ahhh I thought this article contained a version number but I guess I was wrong. Including that would be very valuable as well as demonstrate your consistency and as well, attention to detail.

Updates, no matter how minor, would also suggest some integrity in ownership and recognition of value in having done the review in the 1st place.

Versions, dates, updates
Title: So, it is worth a try,... Thanks   
Name: jbd
Date: 8/4/2005 9:15:03 AM
Comment:
Thanks for your review, I am considering developping applications for our cie using this tool and I understand from you comment that the tool is worth a try.

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