ASP.NET Web User Control Library

Question

We have a bunch of user controls we would like to pull out of a web application and into a separate assembly/library, and I thought it would be as simple as creating a class library and pulling the ascx and ascx.cs files into the project, and compiling a DLL to be reused among our applications.

This was not the case, however.

Our ultimate goal is to have a single distributable DLL (similar to how Telerik distributes their controls) that we can throw into any web application. The steps here: Turning an .ascx User Control into a Redistributable Custom Control were very simple to follow, however this results in many files named controlname.ascx.guid.dll, which is not the desired result. I couldn't even get these to work anyways, since we have additional classes that need to be compiled into the assembly.

Has anyone successfully created a web user control library in .NET (we're using 3.5 here)? I can't seem to find a nice step-by-step guide.

Answer 1

I realize this is an old topic, but if anyone is looking for a solution for creating reusable user control libraries, it turns out it's fairly simple. Here are two good step-by-step guides along with source code:

From MSDN: Turning an .ascx User Control into a Redistributable Custom Control

From Code Project: Straight way to create ASP.NET user controls library

The second link provides a solution to the multiple dlls created by the first link.

Edit- (2) Seems to be a dead link. Here's the new link

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30247/Straight-way-to-create-ASP-NET-user-controls-libra

Answer 2

If you want to share controls among project, my experience has shown that the best way is to build custom asp.net server controls instead of usercontrols. User controls are good for sharing within the same project, but not over multiple ones.

For this purpose I suggest you to build a set of custom server controls inside a class library and use that on all of your projects.

This book does quite a good job at explaining the basics of creating server controls

Edit:
I'm currently developing a .net web server control library. I actually didn't follow any step-by-step guide. I mostly considered using the book I mentioned above and the MSDN library + Reflector, which is a great tool for inspecting existing MS server controls and learning from them.