Creating User Controls

In addition to the built-in server controls in the .NET Framework, you can also build your own controls to be placed on Web Forms. ASP.NET supports two different types of user-created controls: user controls and custom controls. The creation of custom controls is beyond the scope of this book, but it's simple to create user controls. These controls are basically saved pages (or pagelets) that act as self-contained controls.

For example, you may wish to create a menu system along the left side of every page in your site, where each menu item is built from a database. You might also want to place a standard logo and header on each page. What you need is some way to include standard pages, or parts of pages, within each of your pages.

User controls provide this functionality and are the replacement for #include files in ASP.NET. Figure 6.4 displays the output you might want to generate. In this example, the image and header “Northwind Traders” are both in one user control. The menu going down the left side is another control.

Figure 6.5 shows the same Web page in design mode. As you can see, these user controls are simply placeholders. You can see the full UI for such controls by opening the file where you built them within your project.