The perfect DateTimePicker? Not only!

It is well known that a good product is one that provides a solution to your own problem, and as a result would meet the needs of a wider audience. Some time ago I discovered a problem in SPG.Net. I couldn’t make a true DateTimePicker inplace control achieving the level of quality of the overall product. The win32 control from Microsoft has so many issues and inconsistencies that it was a nightmare trying to work around them. Finally I decided to remove this inplace control from SPG and announced it to my customers. I was really dissatisfied by this decision but I had no other choice. Time passed and I was still sure there was nothing I could do about it. I then came to the conclusion that I could rewrite a DateTime picker from scratch but at first I was discouraged because I didn’t know where to start.

This is quite typical. Let time go by and one day you find the courage. I began slowly, one small thing at a time and sooner than expected I had a base control to work with. Instead of tying it to datetime specific requirements, I made the effort of designing it as a generic editor able to edit a series of rule-based fields, a rule being for example “an integer in a specific range”. Smart FieldPackEditor was born but it didn’t know it yet.

I was whispering to myself “it would be great if it could be a standalone product but I guess that many component vendors, and especially the big ones, have already covered this domain”. Guess what? No! I found absolutely no “field editor” controls and concerning DateTimePickers I found only two but one seems to emphasize only a vista look and feel, while the other one was so basic that I can’t even remember who offered it. All the other possibilities are in the “free” domain, mainly on CodeProject. They all derive from a DateTimePicker or a TextBox and try to do their best to fix one or several issues of the MS DTP but the result is never the perfect solution.

So, in essence what are the goals of SFPE:

• To be the best (if not unique right now) DateTimePicker replacement of choice for the old MS DTP.
• To be a generic framework able to let a user edit a set of fields where each field is governed by a rule.
• To be extended via a derived class so that it is fully usable in SPG.Net and therefore will fix my initial problem.

I need your input to make this product an absolute must. So I have opened a new section in the forums and a mailing list on the homepage (so that you can be informed when the beta begins). Given what I wrote above, what do you think ? What are your features of choice ? What are the issues you want fixed first?

In a next post, I will try to summarize all the problems of the MS DTP and expose how SFPE fixes them.