I am looking to create a widget that can be used with other solutions. The widget is a competition widget that can be placed in different parts of the site.
What is the best way to do this? Should I create a new solution to hold this in?
Create a new class library project (you can have it within your current solution if it suits) and create your server controls in there. You can then reference this library from whatever websites you need.
You need to create a Web Control, not a User Control, if you want o use it in other projects. This question details the different control types, you may find it useful:
What is the difference between UserControl, WebControl, RenderedControl and CompositeControl?
Here is relatively simple tutorial on creating a custom WebControl:
Create ASP.NET Server Controls from Scratch
And here some more advanced example from MSDN:
Developing Custom ASP.NET Server Controls
It depends if you will be using it in other solutions really. If you are, then if might make more sense to create a new widgets solution with each widget in its own user control and compile it into an assembly.
Then you just reference that assembly and use it in your markup.
If your widget is only going to be used in a single solution then I wouldn't bother with the above. Just create a user control in the same solution.
As opposite of some answers, you should create user controls with embedded resources.
It is complex to do it, but once you do you will be able to develop controls like RadControls from Telerik.
If you open up their controls you will see that they are all embedded resources on the Telerik.Web.UI.dll.
Here is an old answer of mine that shows how to load the control and how to handle embedded resources (virtual path provider)
Unless you have a good reason to do so (like creating a generic control as a calendar, grid or something like that) don't go this way, it is dark, complex... But as you can see it might be worth it, Telerik.Web.UI is the live example that this can work out.
Related
Does anyone know a good way to embed user controls inside an assenbly so they can be reused across projects. I am not looking to create custom web controls. I have ascx files from different projects which I want to centrally use.
http://www.alexandre-gomes.com/?p=142
was the best one I found so far...
See the question here: Best way to share ASP.NET .ascx controls across different website applications?
One person suggested following this tutorial: Creating and Using User Control Libraries
I have written a data browsing library that is being used in several projects. The library or component includes some classes as well as some ASPX pages.
Until now, we copy all the files into each project to reuse it, with the obvious drawbacks and updating nightmares. I want to encapsulate all the library into a component that the projects can use.
What's the best way to do it? I know I can create a DLL, but I think it's only for the classes, don't know how to go with the ASPXs pages.
We are using Visual Studio 2008 and Framework 2.0
Thanks in advance
This is a perfect case for custom controls.
Change the pages into user controls, and embed the new user controls back into pages that have nothing in them but the reference to the user control.
Once that works, you can change the user controls into server controls, little by little. They will be composite controls, as the user control already is.
There's a trick you can use at this stage: I'm not recalling the details this late at night, but someone else will fill those in: when ASP.NET compiles a page, it first "compiles" the markup into source code, then compiles the source code. You can get ASP.NET to not delete the temporary source files. That allows you to copy into your project code that creates precisely the same HTML as the user control did.
The difference will be - it's now your code and you can refactor it as much as you like, or even include it in a custom control library.
I'm an ASP.NET web part novice. I've built a few simple ones using only a class that derived from WebPart and overriding the CreateChildControls method, but nothing really very substantial. My question is whether it's possible to have a web part that also takes advantage of a separate html/asp.net markup file that will help provide some structure to the web part's output. In the past I just created server controls and added them to the controls collection, but this seems like a silly way to try to create a non-trivial layout. Can I do this? Do I have to use an ascx user control or can I bypass that step? There are a lot of hello world tutorials on web parts out there, but none seem to go past the CreateChildControls override. Thanks!
Yes, there is. Go here to learn about templated web parts, and go here to see all of the info he has on WebParts. I used this technique back in 2004/2005 and it worked very well.
The links in the above answer are no longer working, but here is an alternative one:
http://www.a2zdotnet.com/View.aspx?Id=95
In VS 2010 we also have visual web parts, that I think do pretty much the same trick but it's wrapped in a project item. I've only seen this in the context of SharePoint so not sure how it works for ASP.NET projects. Here is an example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff597539.aspx
I'm looking for a similar control to the InputFormSection control in Sharepoint that I want to use in a regular web page that doesn't run in the context of Sharepoint. Here's how the inputformsection looks like : http://graegert.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/moss_adminarea_page_structure1.png
So do I understand your question correctly? You want to have a control that looks and behave like the InputFormSection control of SharePoint, but it should be able to run outside the context of a SharePoint site?
If so, one approach that you could take is to rip out the generated HTML and use it in your own user control. The IE Developer Toolbar can be of great help to retrieve all other the information (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18359).
It is quite easy to reproduce the control (it is a user control and you have access to the .ascx files). Actually, that's exactly what I ended up doing yesterday.
Yes that sounds backwards. I want to create an area or frame in my Silverlight app to host another page from my site. I've seen it done before but I can't seem to find any examples.
This way I can control the entire page layout using SL but still use existing aspx pages.
thanks
Yes, it can be done and its quite easy to do. I plan on blogging about my HtmlBrowser control and posting the source. The basics are to make sure the Silverlight control is hosted with the isWindowless parameter enabled and then you can at runtime through the HtmlPage class create an IFRAME element and set the src attribute to the HTML page location. The fun part is getting the sizing right, but its not too difficult.
Follow my blog http://craign.net/ over the next couple of days as I'll post my control.
Will frame break out code break out or not when using this technique.