User Controls

User controls, as you might guess, are controls that you write yourself. You create these controls with any text editor, or with the assistance of an IDE like Visual Studio.NET. A user control can consist of text, HTML tags, HTML server controls, and ASP.NET server controls, along with any additional server-side code to handle events and perform server-side processing. The purpose of a user control is to provide the ability to reuse common user interface functionality across your ASP.NET web applications. For example, consider a typical logon page. You might have one textbox control for the logon name, another for the password, and a button control to submit the form logon data to the server. You might additionally have some validation controls to validate the user's input, and various server- side code to perform the actual logon authentication. If this was a common set of functionality that was going to be used by several pages in your web application, you might consider creating a user control to facilitate this functionality so that you only need write it once. You can think of a user control as being very similar to an ASP.NET web form. However, unlike a web form, a user control must always be included into an existing web form in order to work. A user control cannot load independently from a web form