ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Overview of Custom Control Building

Answer two questions before writing a custom control:

• What type of control do I want to write?

• From what class do I inherit?

The two basic types of controls are fully rendered and composite controls. When you build a fully rendered control, you start from scratch. You specify all the HTML content that the control renders to the browser.

When you create a composite control, on the other hand, you build a new control from existing controls. For example, you can create a composite AddressForm control from existing TextBox and RequiredFieldValidator controls. When you create a composite control, you bundle together existing controls as a new control and potentially add new behaviors and properties.

The second ...