ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Name

WebControl

Synopsis

This class is the base class for all web controls. The WebControl class derives much of its basic functionality from System.Web.UI.Control, including functionality for data binding and using view state. The WebControl class adds additional user-interface specific members for configuring the control’s appearance—including a collection of CSS attributes (Style), color options (BackColor and ForeColor), a shortcut key (AccessKey), and various border style, font, and dimension properties. One interesting property that is specific to web controls is CssClass, which sets the Cascading Style Sheet class applied to the control. This is rendered as the class attribute in HTML (for example, <input type=text class="class1" style="ForeColor:red">). Some properties, such as AccessKey, may not be supported on down-level browsers.

All methods and the TagName, TagKey, Attributes, and Style properties are provided for developers to use or override in custom web controls. If you want to create a server control that renders user interface (HTML), you should extend one of the web control classes or inherit directly from WebControl rather than the more basic System.Web.UI.Control class. You should override the RenderContents() method, which provides a System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter for generating output. You do not need to manually output style attributes (or the basic HTML tag, if you have supplied it to the base WebControl constructor), as the WebControl class will handle these ...