Perhaps some of you know that Telerik's tools provide great interoperability with the
Professional Validation And More ("VAM") package by Peter Blum. Peter has a great set of products that offer much more than the validation controls that come with VS. As part of our collaboration, Peter was kind enough to give us a free license for internal use. It was sitting in our software repository and catching dust up until last week. We had to tackle an issue with validation groups in the back-end application of www.telerik.com - the postback triggered the wrong form on the page which wasn't supposed to be validated at all.
So, the web team started thinking about solutions. Choice #1 - re-work the form that was causing the problems. Choice #2 - extend the default validators. Choice #1 seemed like a lot of work. Choice #2 also didn't seem too smart. Luckily, the guys checked the repository and found Peter's VAM package. So, eventually we got yet another choice - use VAM. Eventually, it turned out that all other options would have been a HUGE waste of time. Using VAM we implemented the behavior we needed and forgot about all issues with validation. So why blog about it? Because sometimes even though we are a component vendor we fall in the trap of thinking about building something even though there are great products on the market that already do it. My advice - in case you need the best validation on the market and you wish to save a lot of precious development time, simply go to
www.peterblum.com and get a copy of VAM. You get it all - a well-engineered product and the best documentation that you've probably come across.