Conclusion

Now you know enough to start taking full advantage of the extensibility that creating controls, of all sorts, adds to Web Forms development with ASP.NET 2.0. As with most development decisions, the choice between user controls, custom server controls, and Web Parts is not always clear-cut. ASP.NET 2.0 eliminates many of the reasons that user controls were not as convenient as custom server controls. The less-than-ideal design-time experience for consumers of user controls in Visual Studio .NET and ASP.NET 1.x has been replaced by first-class support for user controls in design time.

In the next chapter, we will look at the administrative side of ASP.NET 2.0. This discussion would be quite short if it covered administrative tools included with previous versions of ASP.NET only there were none! Not so with ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Also in the next chapter, I will cover the ASP.NET controls that help you provide nearly codeless user security for your Web Forms applications.