applications

I found the book to be the absolute best reference on developing server controls. The book is written in a bit text-book language which makes it somewhat "dry". If your are familiar with Microsoft's .NET buzz words you'll be able to follow the book just fine.

This is definitely not a beginner-level book. You have to have pretty good knowledge of C# and ASP.NET.

Overall, 5 stars for excellent coverage of the topic. I just wish the book had more real-life examples.

I've been doing server control development for a year now, read various articles, documentation and the WROX book. Upon reading this book, all of the clouds remaining lifted instantly. Not only is this book step-by-step and thorough, but explains behind the scenes happenings and gives incremental examples that build upon each concept explained and really cements the concepts relayed in this text. Despite one of the other comments here, I feel this is the easiest read I've had in a long time although the nature of the concepts here are just simply on the complex side.

This is THE definitive guide to authoring Server Controls!!! A must read...

I came to this book with considerable experience in ASP, and with fair experience over the past year with ASP.NET, mainly in C#. I also have some experience with Java and object-oriented programming. I wanted to learn how to create custom web controls, and this is one of the few books on the subject. The authors are members of Microsoft's ASP.NET team, so they know the inside story, and technically, they show their knowledge of the topic.

However, the book basically assumes not only that you know C# thoroughly, but also that you understand the event model that is more along the lines of desktop applications. Chapter three hits you with an abstract discussion of component and event programming that is difficult if you're not already familiar with the topic, and the book never really looks back after that. I struggled through the first thirteen chapters before giving up, not feeling like I have a grasp of how I could build controls. At this point I'll either have to painstakingly go back through much of the book again, hoping to catch on, or else find another resource.

The other problem is that when introducing a topic, the text rarely gives a good explanation of why the topic is important; instead, it jumps into details of interfaces and methods. A good example is in chapter nine, when the book turns to processing postback data. Sure, it's important that the control be able to interact with the data in a form, but what does that mean for the control? An example of how this would work and be important would be key here, but instead, the authors open the section with:

"We'll now look at the postback data processing architecture that enables a control to retrieve form data submitted by a user, update its state, and raise events in response to changes in its state. To participate in postback data processing, a control must implement the IPostBackDataHandler interface and render elements whose HTML name attributes have unique values on the page" (p. 203). The discussion continues with the technical details of implementing the interface. By the time they get to the code sample, it's tough to see how the snippets of code added to the previous example helps handle postback data.

I expect that if you are an experienced C++ and C# applications programmer, you'll find the book a great help and reference. If you're fairly new to programming, or most of your experience is with Web applications, I would look elsewhere (perhaps the O'Reilly book by Lowy, though I haven't read that one so can't endorse it either). I realize that topics like event handling are more advanced, but there should be a book that can convey it understandably to the intermediate-level Web programmer.