Professional ASP.Net Server Controls-Building Custom Controls with C#

I consider this a great book for starting to work with ASP.NET Server Controls. I have the MS Press book also but it is just so deep right off the start that it was hard for me to follow. (Although now I refer to it more and more) I have referenced this book may times for creating my server controls and it has been very helpful! Maybe the key is purchasing all of the server control books you can find and taking the best of each but I would definitely recommend this book as a great starting point for server controls.

Audience:This book, Professional ASP.NET Server Controls, is intended for experienced ASP.NET developers that want to build their own custom server controls to extend the functionality of ASP.NET beyond the standard controls. It expects the reader to be familiar with the basics of C#, the ASP.NET model, and object-oriented practices. If you have this background and want to build your own ASP.NET server controls, then this book is for you. Pros:This book aims to be a comprehensive guide to every aspect of building custom controls -- and it succeeds well. Most ASP.NET books focus on user controls and only provide a brief glimpse into building true custom controls, skipping over most of the details, and they seldom get to the advanced topics that can be found in this book. I had managed to discover some parts of building custom controls on my own, but it was not always easy going, and other parts, like templates and data were still new to me -- and I had never understood control builders. I chose this book after skimming it and several others, and this one certainly appeared to be the best of them. I was extremely pleased with this book -- the only disappointment being that I had not gotten it much sooner. It really does cover every detail, including the rationales for building custom controls and when to choose the user control alternative, and every chapter is packed with very detailed examples and complete explanations. I was mostly familiar with the basics of rendering, events, and state, but there are things for everyone to learn, and the advanced topics of templates, data-binding, and control builders were just as enlightening as I had hoped. The book ended with a thorough discussion of design-time support and licensing, and had a complete case study too. Cons:It really was very hard to find anything negative to say about this book, as it was truly an exceptional book. The one obvious exception was the chapter about building controls in Visual Studio .NET, which was a low-level introduction to Visual Studio that seemed very much out of place -- it actually appeared to be marketing to me. Some people also find most Wrox books to not be "flowing", since the chapters are written by different authors, but this doesn't bother me since the intent is an advanced comprehensive book, not an introduction for beginners. Nonetheless, each chapter is mostly standalone, and some may be more comfortable with a book by a single author. Buy It:I give this book my strongest recommendation as a must buy if you want to be an ASP.NET custom control builder. Everything you want in a book, like lots of examples with corresponding explanations of the hows and the whys, are in this book, and I couldn't think of any missing topics that are related to building custom controls either. It is very comprehensive, and yet easy to follow as each chapter starts with the simple cases as it progresses to the more difficult, and even the most knowledgeable ASP.NET developers will

There are a lot of technical books these days that seem like a real waste of time and money, arent' there? This one isn't like that. The authors don't waste your time with an introduction to ASPX or C#, don't bore you with the basics of programming, or anything like that. Instead they give you a focused, on-topic description of the topic. The examples are good, the prose clear and concise, and the chapters broken down well.Another plus is that they tend to stay editor-agnostic. Aside from a few comments (and one full chapter) on Visual Studio.net, everything else can be followed using Notepad. The Visual Studio chapter is pretty good, too.I can't say it enough -- if you've got to build controls, you've got to get this book. Get it now. (No, I'm not one of the authors!)

This book is awesome. Especially because there's so little out there about building Serve Controls. This is not just a MSDN paraphrase, this book is actually content-rich and full of essential information. Until something even better shows up, this book is a must-have.

As a programmer, I think most programming books are fluff with nothing new that you couldn't get from MSDN already. But this book is different. It's mostly about code, techniques, and reference. If you are looking to be serious about .NET, this book is worth reading.