I’ve often said to achieve enything you have to invest. Either money or time.

Now, I don’t have tonnes of money to spend. Most of us µISV’s don’t.

So, what do I have? Time. But not a lot of it. I as an µISV want to bring my software ideas to market. WIll they sell? I don’t know. Who can? If I would be sure, I’d get some funding somewhere and build it.

What is my strategy then?

All my ideas for software, I want to make. I want to make them fast. Every piece of software should be good in terms of quality (or else it comes back to haunt you…).

But for that, I need tools to create software. I used ASP.NET Ajax control toolkit until now but I constantly ran into rendering and postback problems (among other). This was taking up so much of my time I wasn’t really getting to putting the software on the market.

Now a new customer of mine asked me to build him a peice of software to manage incoming and outgoing communication in his company.

I decided this too would make a great piece of software to add to my products list, so I set out on building it.

Recently I did a lot of research on other toolkit out there that could easily integrate with ASP.NET. I did not find anything that was remotly interesting. Last week I had another go at finding a toolkit. I happened to stumble upon Gaia Ajax Widgets.

MARVELOUS!!!

I’m using it now to build a user control (maybe turn it into a server control) to be a generic lookup form. I learned the UI style from my Nav days and it is truly wonderfull.

I will keep you posted on my progress.