In case it has not been obvious throughout this review, I’m pretty excited about this package. The installation was easy. The integration with Visual Studio made using the controls very easy – just drag and drop. There are few applications I’ve built that did not require some kind of date input. The only thing I would improve on is the out-of-the-box size of the script generated, although this is easily optimized using the advice provided in the User's Guide. The User's Guide itself is a huge point in favor of this package. Compared with many other products, this one is superbly well documented. Finally, Peter provides top-notch support. Join his mailing list (on Yahoo! Groups) and lurk for a while, and you’ll see how quickly he responds to users’ questions and feature requests. It’s also telling that, most of the time, the answers he gives can already be found in the User's Guide.

In this review, I have spent most of my time on the data entry form-type controls. In addition the package includes a calendar control, CS_Calendar, which provides a look and feel similar to, but much more feature-rich than, the ASP.NET Calendar control. Brian Desmond has a screenshot in his review.

Now that I’ve used these controls, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the ASP.NET Calendar. I had rather hoped that with ASP.NET 2.0, some attention might be given to the ASP.NET Calendar, to add desperately needed features like month and year drop-down selection. However, it doesn’t appear that this will happen, so you can be assured that if you opt to invest in Peter’s Date Package, it won’t be made obsolete by Microsoft any time soon.

Resources

Brian Desmond’s Review (Oct 2003)

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