Why would an ASP.NET page be empty, but for a user control (.ascx)?

Question

I was hired to do some maintenance to a web site, and I found that there is a user control (.ascx) for every page (.aspx) and only one, like a one-to-one, and every .aspx is empty except for the user control. I dont see the use of that, because every user control is the entire page. Is there a benefit for doing that, or is it useless? I'm afraid to say is something useless becouse I dont have much experience.

Answer 1

My site is built like this: I have several .ascx files and several .aspx files that contain just one user control.

Now there's also a special .aspx file that's actually a single-page application on which I register every .ascx control. The reason I have .aspx files for both the single-page application and for each separate "page" is that during development, I'm mostly working on one "page" at a time so I don't need to load all the other modules of the application. By keeping each module in a separate .ascx file I can make changes to a module and the changes will seamlessly affect both the single-page version of the site as well as the .aspx page I use for development purposes.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

The UserControl is useful as it can be used in many places throughout the application. If its only specific to one page, the user-control loses its purpose.

User-Controls are supposed to be modular and supposed to be designed that they can easily be used in other pages.

From the sounds of the application your maintaining, you'll have to see if the user control is unique to the page, or if its the same user control is used through the app and decide to move things.