ASP.NET Custom Server Controls: Get in Control of ASP.NET
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This article gives an introduction to developing a simple custom server control using ASP.NET with Visual Studio.NET 2003. It is intended for beginners who would like to know about custom controls.
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) versions as well.
A zip file for this article is available for download
here.
Introduction
ASP.NET contains a control framework that is used by developers to create different user interfaces for their web applications. This framework is often referred to as web forms. As ASP.NET is a core element of the .NET framework, the control framework (web forms) is also a part of the .NET framework. The controls related to web forms are generally termed server controls. They are the essence of the web forms programming model.
The server control architecture is extensible, and opened the door to a large community of component developers who can design and implement new custom controls. A custom control is generally an extension to an existing server control or to the “Control” base class. Every sever control (or even custom control) gets converted to HTML tags at run time. This hides all the complexities and inconsistencies of any browser used for browsing the web application.
ASP.NET sever controls provide a rich server side programming model. We can design our own custom controls through properties and methods. We can also embed an event base programming model, which allows page developers to implement application logic in response to user interaction with the web application.
The ASP.NET framework supports a concept called “View State” to manage the state of server controls across individual web requests. Managing the state can be understood as “remembering the values or choices of the user across multiple requests of several pages.” This removes the burden on the page developers to maintain data and state using memory expensive sever objects like “session” and “application” objects.
The server controls support post backs in a very simple manner, together with posting back the data and managing state. The server controls even support the concept of data binding by removing the complexity of “looping with HTML tags” in traditional server side programming languages like ASP, PHP, and so forth. This simplifies the creation of dynamic pages in a very efficient manner, and also improves productivity.
Next: The server control hierarchy >>
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