Throughout this book we’ll be developing a set of solutions (in the form of custom controls most of the time) designed to tackle the more common needs of Web Application development. These range from simple and self-contained controls, like the Spinner control developed in Chapter 2, to more advanced and complex solutions, such as the Search engine presented in Chapter 14.

While developing these solutions, we tried to demonstrate the most varied offering of different approaches as possible. For example, you’ll find some controls that use a database for their storage needs while others will simply rely on an XML file to store any data. Moreover, you’ll notice that some of them are designed to work only with a database as their data source while others are designed with a more flexible (and complex) approach in mind thus allowing almost any data to be used as its source.

You’ll notice these different approaches not only regarding data access, but also with other aspects, like rendering. Some controls will just directly write literal HTML to the stream while others will rely on composition to do the same.

Our objective is to show you how the different topics in custom control development could be approached with the idea that, based on your specific requirements, you could choose whatever approach fits you best.