1.5. Control Development

The linchpin of object-oriented user interface design is the ability to create stand-alone, generic controls that can be applied intelligently to serve any purpose involving interaction and data. The ASP.NET Web Forms technology provided a way to retain that sense of control reusability and apply it to web development. Much like ASP.NET, Silverlight 2 was built with the intention to help developers take what they already know about object-oriented development in .NET and apply it to the Web. In this section, you'll learn how to build controls in Silverlight 2 to encapsulate and reuse your logic across applications.

ASP.NET development is well known for its detailed control abstraction. ASP.NET User Controls are handy for arranging existing controls in template fashion. ASP.NET Web Controls are suitable for customized, intensive tasks where the control's state is translated into units of work on the server and the results aren't necessarily translated into a visual response for the user. Both of these controls inherit from a complex object model that provides many possibilities for custom control developers.