I’ve recently received a few emails from a component vendor announcing their new product, which includes this quote:

And finally, the component developers have been eagerly awaiting for months…
[productname will remain anonymous-ish]is the first-ever collection of a full suite of validation controls with built-in security, for the ASP.NET platform.

Now, I’m sorry, but that’s pretty far from true, at least how I read it. For one thing, ASP.NET 1.0 shipped with a full suite of validation controls with built-in security, which by the way was for the ASP.NET platform. I would think that would be the “first-ever” such collection. However, if we’re talking about third-party enhanced validators, then bar none the market leader is Peter Blum’s Validation and More package, which includes a *ton* of validation controls with way more functionality than the built-in ASP.NET validation controls provide. In either case, it seems pretty obvious to any informed shopper that no suite of validation controls for the ASP.NET platform released in 2006 can possibly be dubbed the “first-ever”. They might be the first to implement some feature, or the first to do things a certain way, but they’re not the first suite of validation controls for ASP.NET.