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I am building visual web parts for SharePoint 2010 Foundation, using ASP.NET 3.5 in Visual Studio 2010. For those who are new, these are like making a custom "normal" .net control that you can drop onto a SharePoint page (because SharePoint is built on .net anyway).

As I'm looking at various examples online to make an input form, I notice some SharePoint specific versions of web controls. Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls generally inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls so would generally include or implement their functionality.

What I have yet to see is a nice listing or description of the benefits of the various SharePoint specific versions of these controls. Why go to the effort of using these specialized versions?

One example I do know is the SharePoint GridView. I found that when used with a DataSource, it has the paging and sorting built-in. So that's nice.

Does anyone know of a listing of similar "benefits" to many of the other controls? I have yet to find a nice one.

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Sorry, this is really to vague to be answerable in its current form. If you can improve the question, per the FAQ, then please flag for moderator attention and we will re-open it for you. Thanks. – SPDoctor♦ Jan 9 at 9:15
Sorry, I understand it was a bit vague. There's not one "dead-on" answer. I'm just curious to find some sites describing why "it will benefit you to use the SharePoint controls because..." For instance, the SP TextBox is better because it now provides built-in "X" in SharePoint. Comparisons like that, for some of the more common controls, laid out in a nice way. I agree I can go read through the docs for each one and try to figure it out one by one. This is just looking for a nice comparison resource is all. – Chad Jan 9 at 16:43
No problem, Chad. We do allow questions of this type, although we don't encourage it, but very vague questions don't work well with StackExchange sites. Thanks for your understanding. – SPDoctor♦ Jan 10 at 13:30
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closed as not a real question by SPDoctor♦ Jan 9 at 9:15

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, visit the help center.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

1 Answer

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So you are asking for a blog post that will have benefits or difference between 100's of controls ? I don't think if someone would had done it but best way is to try it yourself or read MSDN documentation on controls and find out whats the benefit of using different controls, By my experience I believe its just the properties of controls that change if they are in different Namespaces.

Thanks for information you provided but what you are asking is bit too much and don't think you need to know benefits of all of controls as I have been working on it since last 2 years and never got a chance to work on most of controls.

Hope it helps.

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I don't need explanations on all of the hundreds of controls. Maybe just 5-10 of the most commonly used would be nice - text box, drop-down, etc. I just would love to better understand that "It would help me to use a SharePoint text box over a "normal" one because of X, Y, and Z." I've found that on the DataGrid - built in paging and sorting. That's exactly what I'm after. Just curious to see some arguments/benefits for using other SP controls. What benefits have they added to make me want to use each. – Chad Jan 9 at 16:40
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