Control Primer

ASP.Net Web Server Controls are one of the most powerful features in ASP.Net. We use them in a several places to help us build complex user interfaces with very little code in each page.

Included with UnifiedASP are four extended server controls that we use regularly. This control pack can be downloaded by itself and added to any project. Follow the links below for detailed information about each.

• ButtonX – Provides a mechanism to have a button target a different page without doing a post
• GridViewX – An extend GridView control that supports sorting and paging
• TextBoxX – Extended Textbox controls that include built-in validators
• ValidationSummaryX – This just sets some default properties so we don’t have to do set them with every instance

To use any of the controls, you’ll need to add a reference to the dll and specify them in the page or in web.config. We used the web.config approach by adding the following lines within the controls tag.

<system.web>
<pages enableViewState="false">
<controls>
<add tagPrefix="asp" assembly="UnifiedASPControls" namespace="UnifiedASP.Controls.TextBoxX" />
<add tagPrefix="asp" assembly="UnifiedASPControls" namespace="UnifiedASP.Controls.ValidationSummaryX" />
<add tagPrefix="asp" assembly="UnifiedASPControls" namespace="UnifiedASP.Controls.GridViewX" />
<add tagPrefix="asp" assembly="UnifiedASPControls" namespace="UnifiedASP.Controls.ButtonX" />
</controls>
</pages>