Last month, I shipped “Peter’s Data Entry Suite”, a major upgrade merging Peter’s Date Package with Professional Validation and More. Thank you to all who have taken advantage of this upgrade. If this news missed you, please visit http://www.peterblum.com/des/upgrade.aspx to learn more.

• Peter’s Data Entry Suite introductory pricing until March 15
• Peter’s Data Entry Suite v4.0.1 Service Release
• Support for Telerik RadControls “Prometheus”
• DES Developer’s Kit available
• Looking ahead

Introductory pricing until March 15

If you haven’t taken advantage of the upgrade yet, now is the time. Expect upgrade prices and associated offers to change on March 15, 2008.

• Peter’s Date Package v2 users currently have a FREE upgrade available. It will no longer be free.
• Upgrades from Peter’s Date Package v1.x or 2 currently provide a FREE license for the Peter’s Interactive Pages module. It will no longer be free.
• Upgrades from Peter’s Date Package v1.x will have a price increase

Users of Peter’s Data Entry Suite, or any of its modules, can now get v4.0.1, a free service release. It addresses bugs and introduces several enhancements.

• Support for Telerik RadControls “Prometheus” (see below for details)
• Even easier setup within AJAX. Controls can determine if they are in an UpdatePanel or other AJAX container and set their InAJAXUpdate property automatically.
• Debugging reports that expose the current state of the page and DES. You can quickly see how AJAX, licensing, validation and more are operating.

Peter’s Data Entry Suite v4.0.1 now supports Telerik RadControls “Prometheus”. Telerik has been a major part of the ASP.NET world for a while and certainly used by more of my customers than any other suite. As a result, I try to keep my validation framework working well with their controls.

Their “Prometheus” suite is a rewrite of the venerable RadControls suite that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX library for client-side control development. It was a lot of fun to implement support because the ASP.NET AJAX library model and because of those “little things” that make for solid connectivity. The result is that it’s far easier to use DES with Prometheus than with the “Classic” RadControls.

Both “Prometheus” and “Classic” RadControls are supported by DES. For details, see the Using Third Party Controls guide.

• This implementation supports RadControls 2007 Q3, which is a beta of their product line. It’s possible that changes will occur in their RTM release.
• Professional Validation And More Suite will not support RadControls “Prometheus”.
• Supports these controls: RadComboBox, RadEditor, RadGrid, RadMenu, RadDatePicker, RadTextBox, RadNumericTextBox, RadMaskedTextBox, and RadDateInput.

Peter’s Data Entry Suite can be expanded through subclassing. Use the free DES Developer’s Kit to get documentation and samples for subclassing. The documentation is extensive, with a developer’s guide that explains the key methods to subclass and use. It also includes a huge MSDN-style help file with documentation on most public and protected classes and members.

To get it, go to http://www.peterblum.com/des/developerskit.aspx

The following was also posted last month. I’m still interested in your feedback…

OK, maybe it’s a little early to start coding an upgrade. After all, 14 months of development requires some downtime. Yet I have a large list of ideas to expand the Peter’s Data Entry Suite code base that are always on my mind. There are new ways to validate and enter data to be created!

Aside from that, Microsoft has been very busy creating new technologies. What do YOU think of Silverlight and MVC? Should I be investing my time on these platforms? Are there other directions you’d like me to work on? Let me know!

Since last month, I’ve been studying Dynamic Data from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions suite and Validation Application Blocks from the Enterprise Library. Please let me know if you are interested in seeing me develop for them.

My email is plblum@peterblum.com.