Five ASP.NET Controls You Might Be Craving

ASP.NET is a terrific platform for Web applications.That does not mean that tricky coding is always one or two clicks away within a dockable and resizable Visual Studio .NET dialog box. Tricky solutions require tricky coding, just the kind of features that a wizard-driven environment and a general-purpose framework can't provide. In this article, we'll tackle five ASP.NET features that require wicked and creative code.

Have you ever heard about the "real programmer?" The real programmer is someone who makes a living putting one keyword after the next, abiding by some sort of syntax and semantics. Being strongly results-oriented, the real programmer gained a reputation for hating all the bells and whistles that inevitably surround any software technology. Wizards, black box components, and data binding? No, thank you. The real programmer makes a point of writing hundreds of lines of code to get full control over each execution step.

Frankly, I've found myself in the position of the real programmer more than once, especially regarding data binding. As a real programmer, I never used old Visual Basic data-bound controls. If you ever experienced the data-bound controls of early versions of Visual Basic, you know why. But the advent of the .NET Framework changed things quite a bit. The .NET Framework comes with a powerful data binding mechanism implemented for both Windows Forms and Web Forms.

Unfortunately but reasonably, the set of ASP.NET data-bound controls just don't cover all possible scenarios; you can have automatic binding between a data source and a list of check boxes or radio buttons. But if you're looking for a data-bound bulleted or numbered list of strings, prepare to face disappointment.

I'm not sure how you feel about that, but I craved a BulletList control for a while. Then, I made the decision to build it myself. Quite surprisingly, it wasn't too difficult. It is probably a task within the reach of any programmer and not just "real programmers."

By: Leonardo Esposito

dinoesp@hotmail.com

Dino Esposito is a mentor at Solid Quality Mentors where he manages the ASP.NET, workflow, and AJAX courseware. A speaker at many industry events including Microsoft TechEd, Basta, DevWeek, and DevConnections, Dino is the author of the two volumes of Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Applications, for Microsoft Press. You can find late breaking news at http://weblogs.asp.net/despos.

leesposi@libero.it