Book Image

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server

Book Image

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server

Overview of this book

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is a dynamic web publishing system with which you can build websites quickly and cost-efficiently. MCMS provides the administration, authoring, and data management functionality, and you provide the website interface, logic, and workflow. Once your website is up and running, your content contributors can add and edit content on their own, without the need to work with developers or the IT department. First time developers of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 face a relatively steep learning curve. Not only are they expected to be conversant in the Microsoft .NET Framework, they are also required to be familiar with the concepts of MCMS 2002. Many beginners to MCMS start out by looking at the example site that ships with the product; tweaking it, dissecting it and turning it inside out using the obscure code comments as markers. However, when it comes to starting their own website from scratch, many are baffled ? where do they begin? This book exists to answer that question; teaching the essential concepts of MCMS 2002 in a clear, straightforward and practical manner. Containing answers to some of the most asked questions in developer newsgroups, this book is a treasure trove of tricks and tips for solving the problems faced by MCMS developers. This is a unique resource focused exclusively on the needs of developers using MCMS. It doesn?t waste time and pages on user or administrator level information that is well covered in other documentation. It?s a distillation of practical experience that developers need to get results, fast. The authors carefully structured example project complements and extends the knowledge gained from an initial look at the examples that ship with MCMS.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction

Deriving from the BasePlaceholderControl Class


One technique of building custom placeholder controls is to create Web Custom Controls that inherit directly from the BasePlaceholderControl class. This is probably the most popular and also the best documented method. The result is a set of Web Custom Controls that can be distributed to any MCMS web project that requires them.

Don't confuse Web Custom Controls with the Web User Controls we built in Chapter 13. The table below lists the differences between the two.

Web Custom Control

Web User Control

Re-usable across multiple projects. Compiled into a library file that can be referenced by any project.

If you are building a control that could be used across multiple projects, consider using Web Custom Controls instead of Web User Controls.

Good for use only within the project file. If we wanted to share it with another project, we would have to duplicate the code.

Generally harder to create. All logic has to be coded from within a code-behind...