ASP.NET Custom Server Controls: Cute Image Hover Button
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This article introduces you to creating your own Button control, which supports image hovering along with text.
A downloadable file for this article is available
here.
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 Button control for designing web applications with ease. You can even develop your own custom control using the existing Button control by deriving it from the “Button” class (available in ASP.NET framework). Of course, everyone knows this, too. But not everyone would know that we can totally design a Button control right from scratch, controlling the complete implementation.
In my previous articles, I already introduced the design and implementation of our own Custom Server Control from scratch. If you are quite new to the concept of Custom Controls in ASP.NET, I suggest you read my previous articles on this topic before going through this article.
Even though I could use System.Web.UI.Control as the base class for my button 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 makes it cute looking!
The System.Web.UI.Control class features 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 (such as width, height, font, and so on) of the WebControl class get inherited to our textbox control, just as if they were granted.
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: Understanding the life cycle – Rendering methods >>
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