The book had no real vaulable informaiton for an ASP.NET programmer. The book similar to this, written in C#, is so much better even if you have to translate the C#. I do not recommend this book if you're working in the ASP.NET environment. I can not speak to WinForms and this book, but the C# book will work fine for both environments.

The book had no real vaulable informaiton for an ASP.NET programmer. The book similar to this, written in C#, is so much better even if you have to translate the C#. I do not recommend this book if you're working in the ASP.NET environment. I can not speak to WinForms and this book, but the C# book will work fine for both environments.

This book is unusual in that, in addition to providing you with the information you actually bought the book for, you get lots of information about some pretty obscure .Net topics. Even better (assuming you're an experienced VB Developer), he doesn't waste so darn much space taking up topics you're already sick of reading about (controlling program flow, what is a class, and the like). He also mentioned in passing a couple of little gems in the SDK that I was unaware of. Of course, if you're not an experienced developer, why are you buying a book on controls? (save your money!) So John Connell gets a dozen stars for content.

The ugly: the book is poorly edited. There are a number of typographical errors, grammatical word omissions, etc. There are innumerable bugs in the book's code. There are also a number of omissions in the instructions, of a type such as instructing you to add a class without mentioning which component to add the class to, things like that. You'll want to get the download code from MSPress, so you can look at his code to see where he added a module, or whatever. Because I am an experienced developer, I found that the debugging required actually improved my learning (by keeping me awake), but I'm pretty sure an inexperienced programmer would get pretty frustrated. So: no stars to MSPress for the editing and testing of code! Bad job here, you guys, and considerably worse than the job you usually do.

If you already know how to program, buy this book!

This was an excellent book for VB.NET Windows Applications (all examples were for windows, but the principals and some of the code would work for the web) in using Editors, Type Converters, Designers; a lot of the advanced topics.

Talking directly about ASP.NET and mobile applications was lacking a lot, in my opinion, but overall still I thought it was a great book to teach more advanced topics useful at design time.

If you think you know the framework, I suggest you take a look at Mr. Connell's book. He covers many undercovered areas in great detail. Isolated storage and encryption come to mind. In short, if you are looking for new material, I highly recommend this book. Its on a par with Mr. Connell's .Net Coding Techniques.

Goes very deep into building .Net controls including some licensing models and some encryption. However, it doesn't talk much about the why of coding. John Connell just tells you how to do it. He does not explain why you would use certain methods or components.

So, if you wanted to know the "whys" of coding, this book is not for you.

I have Connell's database book, and his other Microsoft Book on Coding Techniques. So, I purchased this book because I was so pleased with the other 2. This is excellent. If you wish to build a control - he covers both client and ASP.NET. And if you have a really good idea for a control, he goes into several advanced licensing techniques. Probably my favorite chapter is on encryption. I can see why Microsoft wanted Mr Connell to write another book. He has a keen sense of knowing what readers want and can explain his thoughts with crystal clearity.

I have Connell's "Beginning VB6 Database" book which I found to be pretty valuable.

"Developing Microsoft .Net Controls" is better written but lacks enough meat, especially for ASP.Net programmers where it is way too sparse.

Here's the basic problem. The book is 10 chapters long. Chapter 1 is pretty much controls 101. Then there's Chapter 2 explaining the WinForm controls shipping with Visual Studio. And we can't forget Chapter 9 explaining WebForm controls that ship with Visual Studio. Oh, I didn't mention Chapter 3 is "advanced" use of WinForm controls that ship with Visual Studio. These chapters are just as long as all the rest meaning 40% of the book has nothing to do with developing custom controls!

There is some hard to find elsewhere meat on topics like licensing controls but for many coders today developing advanced web forms on intranets, there's only one rushed chapter that's useful on ASP.Net custom controls that competes with mobile and user controls for space. Which leaves us with a rather bare page counter example to build upon for advanced real world development. I outgrew the page counter example with my first try at developing a useful custom control.

I rate it 2 stars because I'm primarily a web developer. WinForm developers may get enough out of it to raise it to 3 stars.

I recently purchased this book to learn more about the advanced topics of authoring controls and I am abhorred. I feel instead like I'm an editor correcting a novice author's mistakes. Generally I seek out books published by Microsoft Press because they represent an excellent knowledge base for Microsoft products, but if I find another book like this one, it may be the last.

John Connell is terribly inconsistent with his naming conventions, often referring to classes when he means objects and objects when he means classes, abstract when he means static, and so on. The code examples are poorly written and inconsistent with his own instruction. In one sentence he advises calling Dispose() to clean up resources and a paragraph later uses two disposable objects without following his own advice. Much of the code doesn't even compile as shown. For example he shows strings broken onto separate lines that end with an ampersand and line continuation character but don't start with a quotation mark on the next line. He makes ridiculous comments on how it's unadvisable to embed an apostrophe in a string because the editor will interpret it as a comment. (Yes, he really said that. "Now set up a string with the drive the user selected, which you retrieve from the dDrive class, and concatenate two single quotes. This way, you don't get lost in a sea of mismatched double and single quotes. And as you know, the editor sees a single quote as a remark." You'll also notice he once again referred to a variable holding an object, or *instance* of a class, as a class.)

And it goes on and on and on from there. Microsoft Press guys, please don't ever let John Connell write another book for you again.

For Ramesh: Table of contents for the books may be found at http://www.booksmatter.com/b0735619247.htm

I'm with the first reviewer. For a long time now, i'm trying to find this book's table of contents. It's not in MSPress site or anywhere else. I'm really sick and tired of shallow or no books on .NET Controls and the amazon reviews are also misleading these days. May be there is not much going on at Redmond after the initial fluff , i guess ;)

While I've never built a control before, I need to build something for a client. After pre-ordering this, I was amazed to find out about designer verbs and designers in general. The Wizards of Redmond constructed the pieces to interact and really make building sophisticated controls easy for anyone that understands OO and VB.Net (which is what I use). I purchased and read Connell's other books so hoped this would be in a par. "Controls" takes you from soup to nuts - and even discusses sophisticated licensing so you can build a control and sell it. If you are new to controls, even though this covers some fairly complicated technology, Mr. Connell clearly explains how its used and provides tons of full examples. Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth. Personally, I found the book extremely useful even if I didnt need it as I do. The technologies he explains such as encryption, serialization, and isolated storage alone make this a valuable tool for any serious professional programmer.