Review: XtraScheduler Suite

XtraPivotGrid Suite 1.0.0, $199.99 without source code/$299.99 with source code
Developer Express
Las Vegas, Nevada
(702) 262-0609  
http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/XtraScheduler/

The XtraScheduler Suite is basically an implementation of one user interface: the day/week/month scheduling views of Microsoft Outlook. Of course, that's a rather complex interface, so the word "suite" is justified from the point of view that you get a whole pile of specialized controls, from the overall scheduling canvas to the dropdowns for resources to the user interface for picking appointment recurrence (and of course calendars). It's all put together with Developer Express's usual attention to customization, so you can tweak things to your heart's content. If you want to change to group things by date or resource assigned, to use custom draw in place of the built-in appearance, or to specify fancy backgrounds or colors for any element, it's not a problem. It also ties into DevExpress's standard "look and feel" skinning system.

The controls support the user actions you'd expect, from drag-and-drop scheduling to editing in place. It can be used in either bound or unbound modes, though I rather suspect it will be more useful in bound applications, where the schedule and resource information come from standard DataSets. Included tutorials show how to hook all this up. The help file, unfortunately, is unfinished in the 1.0.0 release - the detailed object model help is present, but most of the overview topics are merely placeholders. So you'll need to be prepared to figure things out from the sample projects (supplied in both VB and C#) and the three tutorials if you want to use this in your own application. Overall, this looks like it will save a bunch of time if you need scheduling and your users understand the Outlook UI - I don't know about you, but that's not a UI that I personally would care to spend time rebuilding.

  Click for larger screenshot

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.