ASP.Net was a radical change from its predecessor Active Server Pages (ASP) that represented an easy way to write dynamic pages prior to July 2000 when we saw the first introduction of Microsoft’s new .NET framework.  ASP was a great tool, but it was not an enterprise tool and it required the developer to write the code to handle just about everything.  ASP.Net was an incredible upgrade from a scripted non enterprise level programming tool to an object oriented enterprise level framework that made the life of web developers much easier by shielding the developer from the low level tasks of dealing with HTTP requests.  With ASP.Net came a powerful toolset that provided an event driven model of development (even if it was only an illusion) and a truly powerful framework of reusable objects that made web development very similar to the rapid application development environments that existed in the Windows development world.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to create a simple composite server control for ASP.Net 2.0.  Just as important, or more importantly, it demonstrates the benefits of creating your own custom server controls.  I will demonstrate these points by walking through a simple example scenario where the task is accomplished without the use of a custom control.  We will then turn the solution into a custom server control that can be reused throughout our sites and across various other projects where such functionality would be useful.