ASP.NET 2.0 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Working with User Controls

In This Chapter

✓	Getting a handle on what user controls do
✓	Creating a simple user control
✓	Putting a user control in a page
✓	Adding properties to a user control
✓	Making use of user-control properties

All told, ASP.NET provides more than 50 different types of controls you can use on your Web pages. (You can learn the details of each control by looking them up in the Visual Studio help.) You’d think that would be enough, but some applications can benefit from controls that go beyond the basic capabilities provided by ASP.NET.

Fortunately, ASP.NET provides two ways you can create your own controls that build on and extend the standard controls: custom server controls and user controls. The most advanced type of custom control is called a custom server control. (Creating custom server controls is an advanced topic that’s covered in Book 9.) User controls don’t have all the bells and whistles of custom server controls, but they are much simpler to create and use.

All code listings used in this book are available for download at www.dummies.com/go/aspnetaiofd. Note that you’ll find both C# and VB.NET versions of all the listings in this chapter available for download from the Web site.

Introducing User Controls

A user control is a special type of ASP.NET page that can be included in another ASP.NET page just as if it were a control — which (in fact) it is. Because ...