Hi Dan,
Thank you for your response. Like you pointed, handling iCal could be a nice option (or in my opinion MUST HAVE) for such a complete presentation layer Calendar control. I will take a look at the C# iCal parser implementation to understand the parsing process.
On the other hand, almost all RSS feeders, that utilize AJAX and DHTML, moves the RSS/XML parsing to client-side and leave a Proxy Back-end on the server-side to actually fetch the RSS/XML and sent to presentation layer when presentationmakes a request through XHR. Therefore, the ClientSide(presentation layer) becomes a stand-alone iCalendar (retrieve iCal, parse iCal, render Calendar, update/amend iCal, re-render Calendar, post to Server or other remote locations again through XHR.
The client-side parsing will add enourmous amount of speed and make the whole DayPilot calendar control into a Client-side, standalone Calendar Application that supports iCal. I mean you may have heard of Google Gears which introduces client-side caching+storage and people are crafting more and more AJAX applications to be a standalone apps that they can run when they are offline or online.
Personally, i liked the DayPilot a lot and wont blink to purchase the PRO edition if i have money (sniff..). Limiting this beatifull and very impressive client-side functionality only into ASP.NET back-end driven logic could be turning away all other amazing opportunities that are coming/there. Dojo, Adobe AIR, Google Gears-based frameworks are all playing a possible potential here, imho.
all the best,
keilo.