Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

4.5. Practical Tips on Working with Controls

The following list presents some practical tips on working with controls.

• Spend some time trying out all the different controls. Although many of them are used and discussed throughout the book, it's good to know how you should use them and how they operate. By experimenting with them now in a few sample pages, you have a head start when the controls reappear in later chapters. Because of the complexity, ignore the controls in the categories other than the Standard one. For these controls, you'll need more background information that you'll be given throughout the remainder of this book.

• Seriously consider turning off ViewState for some of your controls. In many cases, you hardly notice the difference, but especially with the data-driven controls discussed in Chapter 12 and onward, disabling ViewState can seriously decrease the size of your web page, resulting in shorter load times and improved user experience.

• Before you design a complex Web Form with multiple controls to accept user input, step back from your computer and take a piece of paper and a pen to draw out the required functionality. By thinking about the (technical) design of your application before you start dragging and dropping or coding, it's much easier to create a consistent and well-thought-out user interface. Making considerable changes later in the page if you've taken a wrong route will always take more time than doing it (almost) right the first time.

• Experiment ...