Building Controls advice

[Griff]

I'm after a book that is the "must have" book on developing composite server
controls.

One person recommended the following book:

Developing ASP.NET Server Controls and Components (Paperback)
by Nikhil/Datye, V. Kothari (Author), Nikhil Kothari (Author),
Vandana Datye (Author)

But this appears to be ASP.NET 1.x and I'm really after a 2.0 reference.

Any suggestions most appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Griff

 

[q]

Theres always "Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control and Component
Development " from Wrox. The book is WAY too big for anyone to
actually hold (it'll rip in half), but it is 2.0. I don't know how
good it is though... books with people on the cover always creep me
out a bit.

 

[Brennan Stehling]

This may be the book you want...

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780735621770&itm=2

I purchased that book recently because it is written by Dino Esposito
who is one of my favorite writers for ASP.NET. You will find he also
has great content on MSDN.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...p/html/ASPNETContDev.asp#aspnetcontdev_topic5

I have learned a lot from his books. As a result, I learned to do
Design-Time debugging to help me develop those server controls. I
wrote a tutorial on that here.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2006/08/30/design-time-debugging-aspnet-20-in-visual-studio-2005/

Brennan Stehling
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/

 

[Jon Paal]

This is one of the huge voids in DotNet.. even though controls are at the heart of development.

Writers like Esposito and Kothari are extremely hard to follow because of their writing style which tends to drift to and fro during
an explanantion of a given topic.

Most other books only delve into introductory level topics which are just as easily gleaned off the internet...

 

[Michael Hamrah]

Get Khotari's book even though it's 1.1. It's by far the best and does
a great job in teaching you about the principles of custom control
development. If you understand that book then the features in 2.0 will
be easy- nothing is radically different. Some new page events, a
CompositeControl class, etc., but the underlying architecture is the
same. You simply won't find a better book!

Michael Hamrah

 

[Griff]

That's certainly is a big thumbs up for this book.

One worry is that I'm particularly interested in the CompositeControl...

I've found two examples on MSDN:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms379565.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479016.aspx)

Both of which appear to take significantly different approaches...

Griff

 

[Michael Hamrah]

Hey Griff,
There's a lot new in ASP.NET 2.0, but when it comes to Composite
Controls I'd say it's not so much "new" but "enhanced". The
CompositeControl and CompisiteDataBoundControl are good examples- these
just wrap up a set of existing functionality you'd have to write
manually in 1.1. The biggest different is that you get out of the box
design time functionality with the CompositeControl class, which is
something that was a pain in 1.1.

Khotari's book will give you a great understanding of the Page Life
Cycle, the Loading PostBack Data, handling PostBack Events, and
creating the control tree for composite controls. All of these three
things have changed little in 2.0- (there are more events in the page
life cycle).

The two articles you sent really take the same approach, which is
implementing CreateChildControls() method to build the control tree.
Espisito's article talks about databound composite controls and
handling postbacks- this is covered in Khotari's book with essentially
the same approach (minus the v2 help you automatically get with
CompositeDataBoundControl). Using the Render() method is faster but
provides your end user with a burden of not leveraging existing ASP.NET
controls for development (like the textbox, linkbutton, etc.). In the
long term you could end up writing a lot of ad-hoc html in the render
method and box yourself into a maintanence nightmare with property and
if statement sprawl.

Either way, my point is Khotari's book will give you a great
understanding of how ASP.NET works. With it you'll be able to
understand what's going on in 2.0 a lot better (like those articles).
I've only glanced at 2.0 books and nothing's really jumped out as more
informative, and I haven't had to relearn anything for 2.0 that I
learned in 1.1. Don't think somethings better because it has a new
coat of paint!

Michael Hamrah