Saturday, November 19, 2005

Noogen.Validation - WinForms validation made easy

After doing mostly ASP.NET and SharePoint solutions, I was quite pleased with the validation mechanisms of ASP.NET. I was very surprised and disappointed when I moved to developing WinForms solutions, and had to downgrade from the ASP.NET validator and validation summary controls to the WinForms stuff.

Gone were the validators and I had to use an ErrorProvider on my forms, as if I need something to provide me with errors. The worst was the need for iterating recursively over all controls on a form when clicking OK to ensure that all error had been corrected and that validation events returned success, before e.g. calling my biz-logic to save changes. I just wanted to have my Page.IsValid property back.

At my current project we agreed that the standard validation mechanism was to awkward for us, and one of the developers did some research to find a component that would make WinForms validation as simple as WebForms validation. This lead us to Noogen.Validation at CodeProject, a control that we have been using for some time now.

I just love the simplicity and flexibility of the Noogen.Validation component, and I strongly recommend it. It is the best add-on component I have used since the Farpoint Spread control for VB6. Thanks, Noogen!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know if Noogen is still around or if the control has been updated? The date on it is pretty old so one would assume that there have been updates and enhancements....

Kjell-Sverre Jerijærvi said...

In my last project, we used the EntLib validation app block (VAB): http://www.codeplex.com/entlib

Anonymous said...

Thanks, I'll check it out.