ASP.NET Control Overview

During the course of development, we often find ourselves duplicating a routine more than once or following similar patterns. Such situations invoke our sense of productivity and creative desire to improve our work. These are prime circumstances for writing generic routines that eliminate duplication and contribute to a growing library that moves the entire team forward with reusable code.

In a way, the same concept applies to user interfaces. A good Web site will have a consistent look and feel on all its pages. It will have the same headers, menus, footers, and many other similar user interface facilities. This is another form of duplication, which is good from a user's perspective, but irritating from a programmer's point of view if the code is duplicated also. In the past this problem was solved by different Web technologies and tools that emerged to help work with this duplication in an efficient manner. However, Web technologies have not met the levels of convenience and efficiency enjoyed by desktop client developers with rich user interface controls until now.

ASP.NET controls bring the productivity and reusability that once only belonged to desktop developers to the Web. Web developers can now create their own controls, download free controls from the Web, or purchase entire control suites from a rapidly growing third-party ASP.NET control vendor market. This chapter focuses on how to build user controls and custom controls. A user control is a quick and simple way to combine existing controls. Custom controls are more complex, powerful, and well suited for deployment in multiple applications. The sections that follow show how to build each of these control types with C#Builder.

SHOP TALK
THE ULTIMATE IN REUSE

One of the best examples of reuse with controls is the ASP.NET Forums. This is an open source initiative by Microsoft that produced an ASP.NET discussion forum. What makes this a remarkable example of reuse is that every single Web Form in the entire application is made up of controls. It would be very educational for any developer who is building Web applications to download this free software and inspect the code. It can be found at the Microsoft ASP.NET Community site at http://www.asp.net. I've downloaded the code myself and set it up to run on my Web site, C# Station, at http://www.csharp-station.com.



C# Builder KickStart
C# Builder KickStart
ISBN: 672325896
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 165

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