Do you people out there in web-land find yourself making alot of custom controls?
The place I work in is predominately old school FoxPro with a desire to start moving towards .NET. One of the things they've done is create a cubic ton of custom controls (it's been a very steep learning curve getting into their systems for me as a developer... for example there are like 10 different custom combo boxes...).
The theory, as described to me, is that every control should know how to "wire itself" (big chunk of the applications here are just form data in/out to sql server), and it has been suggested to me that they will want to start off in .NET by subclassing every control...
Now I've been working in .net for 2+ years and I think I've subclassed a control twice... there just isn't alot I've worked on that I could not accomplish easily within the parameters of existing controls. Plus I think that by avoiding custom controls it makes the learning curve for those who follow behind me a little less steep (gasp a programmer who actually codes trying to help those that come after. I know, it's not natural!).
My gut tells me a few things:
1. You shouldn't subclass anything unless you find a specific need to subclass it. Why do a bunch of work for nothing?
2. Creating a cubic ton of custom controls hinders development b/c you have to remember what control for what situation multiplied several times (especially here).
3. Knowing how to “wire yourself” doesn't require custom controls at all, you can databind just about anything in .NET by default.
So yeah, toss me some opinions. =)