I firmly believe that no review is terribly useful if it doesn’t include some needs improvement items. For Iron Speed Designer, I ran into a few issues that on the whole were pretty minor, but which bear mentioning. Building the application can be fairly slow if you start getting into a large number of tables. For the two-table application shown in this walkthrough, things were pretty quick, but for another sample I created which included 8 or 10 tables, the build process took a significant amount of time (more than a few seconds), a lot of which appeared to be time spent communicating with the database updating stored procedures. This likely would have been faster if I had been working with a local database as opposed to a remote one via the Internet, so it’s likely more of a problem with my lack of sufficient bandwidth than with anything Iron Speed could fix. However, since most of the time I wasn’t modifying anything with the stored procedures, it might have optimized the build process by keeping track of whether or not things had changed with respect to the database, instead of re-running the scripts on every build.

Another issue I encountered had to do with trying to customize which columns were returned from the search results of a query. This too was with my larger sample, and the end result was that I kept getting the default columns returned in addition to my specifically selected columns. This is very likely user error, and my next step was going to be to try out Iron Speed’s Developer Forums to see if I could get a quick fix there, but my publication schedule didn’t allow time for that.