Advanced ListBox with color items and icons. Full source code provided.

A good example of a particular repeatable scenario within a website would be a DropDownList of States (for those living in the United States, of course). There's no need to create the code for this scenario multiple times within a web site. The best choice is to create a User Control for this, if you have multiple places where it can be used.

Let's start off by creating the DropDownList on the page:

<asp:DropDownList id="ddlStates" runat="server"/>
Now, let's populate the DropDownList with the states (some of you will recognize this from a previous Code Sample).

Sub Page_Load(Source as Object, E as EventArgs)
if not Page.IsPostBack then
 Dim sStates() as string={"","AK", "AL", "AR", "AS", "AZ", "CA", "CO", "CT", _
 "DC", "DE", "FL", "GA", "GU", "HI", "IA", "ID", "IL", "IN", "KS", "KY", "LA", _
 "MA", "ME", "MD", "MI", "MN", "MO", "MP", "MS", "MT", "NC", "ND", "NE", _
 "NH", "NJ", "NM", "NV", "NY", "OH", "OK", "OR", "PA", "PR", "RI", "SC", "SD", _
 "TN", "TX", "UT", "VA", "VI", "VT", "WA", "WI", "WV", "WY"}
 ddlStates.datasource=sStates
 ddlStates.databind()
end if
End Sub

Web Image Browser - Lots of images and no time to publish them?

This Image Browser with directory explorer has thumbnail/web freindly on-the-fly image creation and caching.

This article was originally published on http://www.asptoday.com

The final destination of this article will be the implementation of a simple ASP.NET User Control.  The journey will take you along a path intertwined with multiple technologies, each being used for its inherent strengths and flexibility.  The end result will be a highly extensible and ultimately necessary part of every web project – a horizontal dropdown menu control.

In this article, Nick Howard will demonstrate the use of an ASP.NET user control coded in C#.  In order to accomplish this task, a variety of technologies will be utilized including XML, XSL/XSLT, CSS and JavaScript.