Validation controls have been one of my favorite features of ASP.NET since I first saw it previewed (back when it was still ASP+). Coming from an ASP background, where integration of client- and server-side validation was, to be kind, tedious, I was eager to put these controls to the test. Initially, I was very pleased with the controls, but with time it became clear that they were "a good start" and were not really sufficient for many real world validation requirements (without resorting to custom validators and a lot of custom code, anyway). Enter Peter Blum's suite of validation controls (and more!), Professional Validation and More 3.0.3.

More than just validators, this suite of over 40 ASP.NET controls is designed to replace and extend the ASP.NET data entry control set, making it much easier to collect data from web forms and drastically improving your users' experience. The latest version (3.0.3 at the time of writing) is fully compatible with Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. For this review, I actually tested the controls in both VS 2003 and VS 2005 (and ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0).