Bundles of Advice

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices team has been busy bundling their advice. So busy in fact, they've decided to package the advice along with software bits including software components, test harnesses, guidance documents, How-To tutorials, and so on. And you guessed it. They're calling these things bundles.

You might wonder why Microsoft would focus effort here when there are a rich universe of 3rd party developers with hold catalogs of easy-to-use controls that you can drop into your application. The answer is that yes, there are lots of options out there for developers looking for a widget, but sometimes a control has to be built from scratch for specific behavioral reasons.

You know, the control that has work a certain way because it always has. Or because the customer wants it to work that way. Or because the big boss wants it to work that way. Whatever. The point is that sometimes you have to roll your own.

What better way to proceed with this than to be given specific guidance from Microsoft in the form of controls that you can use now. While the control itself may not be everything you need, you can certainly learn a lot of by studying its implementation with a mind to what the P&P believes are ASP.NET best practices. This answers the often-asked-question "What would Microsoft do here?".

Worth a look if you're contemplating creating your own controls for your ASP.NET application.

Go here.

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 04:34 PM  Permalink