asp.net building controls: I picked up a project that has been started with one form and about 20
controls, and am wondering if this is very practical. It seems to work
well; and is easy to follow. The form has a header with a menu, and each
item on the menu opens a panel with one or more controls on it.

I know in VB6 this would be a nightmare, but not so sure about using so many
controls with .net. Any thoughts, is this simply bad design? Most likely
the program will get more complex.

well there are two ways to use have a common look and feel without adding
individual pieces of code on every page.

The first is using user controls. you bind the common function used across
multiple pages in application within a user control.
There are again different ways to use user controls. you can choose to have
multiple pages with different combination of use controls and content
related to the context of the page or
you could just have one page with different controls being swapped about
with context of say a menu item selection.

The Second way is use of master pages.. the implementation of master pages
in current current implementation is a custom one and we will have to use it
till asp.net 2.0 comes out.

Using too many controls its not so much as a good design / bad design
thing - though it can make debugging a bit tricky.
As for any performance hits, i would say not that significant because in
compiled code it normally just an additional call to load control and render
its html. If you have a look at life cycle of a request you will understand
how it works better. This blog details a few links to page lifecycle in
asp.net
http://weblogs.asp.net/eporter/archive/2003/07/15/10109.aspx

hope this helps
--

Regards,

Hermit Dave
(http://hdave.blogspot.com)
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