Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

12.1. User Controls

A well-built web application divides its work into discrete, independent blocks. The more modular your web application is, the easier it is to maintain your code, troubleshoot problems, and reuse key bits of functionality.

Although it's easy enough to reuse code (you simply need to pull it out of your pages and put it into separate classes), it's not as straightforward to reuse web page markup. You can cut and paste blocks of HTML and ASP.NET control tags, but this causes endless headaches if you want to change your markup later. Instead, you need a way to wrap up web page markup in a reusable package, just as you can wrap up ordinary C# code. The trick is to create a user control.

User controls look pretty much the same ...