Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 6. ASP.NET 2.0 Web Server Controls

When I sat in one of the first review sessions for ASP.NET 2.0 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, I remember being amazed by the number of new server controls (in addition to many other new and exciting features) this newest release offered. The core infrastructure was already in place with ASP.NET 1.0/1.1; but with the much-improved 2.0 release, the ASP.NET team was making the lives of developers even simpler.

The purpose of the large collection of new controls is to make you more productive. These controls give you advanced functionality that, in the past, you would have had to laboriously program or simply omit. In the classic ASP days, for example, few calendars were used on Internet Web sites. With the introduction of the Calendar server control in ASP.NET 1.0, calendar creation on a site became a trivial task. Building an image map on top of an image was another task that was difficult to achieve in ASP.NET 1.x. Through the use of a new server control, however, this capability is now built into ASP.NET 2.0.

This chapter takes a look at some of these new server controls and explains how to use them in ASP.NET 2.0 applications. It doesn't cover all of the new controls, many of which are discussed in other chapters of this book.

BulletedList Server Control

One common HTML Web page element is a collection of items in a bulleted list. The BulletedList server control is meant to display a bulleted list of items easily in an ordered ...