Chapter 10. Creating Custom Web Controls

The controls that ship with ASP.NET are meant to save you development time and make you a more efficient, productive developer. There is no doubt that trying to build a modern Web application without controls would be a costly endeavor. Even with all its controls, however, ASP.NET does not have all the encapsulated features that you might need for applications built for your given business domain. For example, you might have a common need to show user data across multiple applications. In this case, you would want to encapsulate this functionality and provide it to each application as a control.

Fortunately, ASP.NET provides the capability to take the existing controls and group them together in what are called user controls. You can also take the additional step of encapsulating controls as Web server controls. These controls work on the same framework as the ASP.NET controls and therefore take advantage of design-time support in the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This chapter covers how you create and use these two primary custom Web controls.