ASP.NET Custom Server Controls: Cute ASP.NET TextBox Control

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This article introduces you to creating your own TextBox control with cool features without even deriving it from an existing ASP.NET TextBox control.

The sample downloadable solution (zip) is entirely developed using Visual Studio.NET 2003 Enterprise Architect on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. But, I am confident that it would work with other versions of Windows (which support .NET 1.1) as well.

Introduction

Everyone knows that ASP.NET already contains a flexible TextBox control to design web applications with ease. You can even develop your own custom control using the existing TextBox control by deriving it from the “TextBox” class (available in the ASP.NET framework). Of course, everyone knows this too. But not everyone knows that we can design a TextBox completely from scratch with our own control over the complete implementation.

In my previous article (Developing ASP.NET Custom Server Controls: Introduction), I already introduced how to design and implement our own custom server control from the scratch. If you are quite new to the concept of custom controls in ASP.NET, I suggest you go through the article specified above. But it doesn’t support “postback” or “viewstate” features. 

Even though I could use System.Web.UI.Control as the base class for my textbox control, I selected System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl as the base class, because of the convenience and ease. Apart from all of these, we will also implement support for “postback” and “viewstate.” We will also examine client-side JavaScript, being emitted from our control, which is what makes it cute looking!

The System.Web.UI.Control class has only a few rendering methods which could be overridden. This gives us less flexibility in developing the custom control, when we compare it with the rendering methods available in the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl class. Of course, some of the most important properties (like width, height, font, and so on) of the WebControl class get inherited to our textbox control.

Before talking too much about the control, let us go to the implementation first. We will create a Visual Studio.NET 2003 solution throughout this article with more than one project. 

Next: Developing the “MyTextBox” Control >>
 

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