Chapter 9. Debugging Server-Side Controls

ASP.NET SERVER CONTROLS PROVIDE AN ENORMOUS amount of power to you as a programmer in developing truly object-oriented web-based applications. In the simplest terms, a server control is a control that is executed on the server and that provides some type of output to the user. These generally are used to create brandnew types of user-interface controls that are not currently available in ASP.NET.

If you have been using ASP.NET, you will be familiar with the <asp:></asp> style tags that have been introduced into the language. These tags that you insert into your HTML page are really server-side controls that implement either a standard HTML control or a custom control that is only part of ASP.NET, such as a data grid. In the traditional ASP paradigm, this can be thought of as an include file that contains the HTML or JavaScript required to implement a new type of control. Now, however, you are actually building a real compiled component that is executed entirely on the server.

This chapter focuses on creating a server-side ASP.NET control, including navigating some common pitfalls in developing a control like this and properly debugging it both as it is being written and after it has been completed. The demonstration project used in this chapter is an extremely simple tab control.