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Developing Delegate Controls

Delegate controls provide a superior way of control replacement or substitution based on ControlID and a Sequence number. By using delegate controls, you can replace existing controls on a page with your own controls without customizing or modifying the page markup code. The delegate controls are enclosed in SharePoint:DelegateControl tag. If you examine the contents of the v4.master page (out of the box SharePoint 2010 master page) and search for this tag, you would notice that controls such as Top Navigation’s Data Source, Search box, and so on are delegate controls, which means that you can easily replace them with your own custom controls.

For example, let’s replace the links on the top navigation panel based ...