ASP.NET ships with a variety of essential Web controls - the TextBox, the DropDownList, the GridView, and the like. While these controls are fine and dandy for simple scenarios, they quickly become obsolete for more complex ones. Consider collecting date values. The ASP.NET toolbox includes a TextBox and a Calendar control, either of which can be used independently to capture date values, but a better user interface involves a textbox integrated with a pop-up calendar. Similarly, ASP.NET's TextBox control is great for collecting plain text input, but falls short if you need users to be able to enter formatted text.
Microsoft has made it clear that they plan on including only the basic controls in the ASP.NET toolbox and have left more advanced controls to the third-party market. There are a variety of third-party ASP.NET control vendors, from small one-man operations providing a single product, to larger companies that include a suite of controls. One such vendor that I've written about before on this blog and in my Toolbox column in MSDN Magazine is Karamasoft. I recently wrote a whitepaper for Karamasoft that provides an overview of UISuite, a control suite that encompasses ten UI-related controls. The whitepaper, Let UISuite Do Your Dirty Work [PDF], showcases how quick and easy UISuite's components make building and implementing powerful user interfaces.
UISuite contains the gamut of canonical ASP.NET controls - there's a rich text editor, a menu, a date picker, and so on - but what most impressed me was the UltimateSearch component. Searching the contents of a website involves crawling and indexing content and displaying a search user interface. Microsoft provides Index Server to assist with searching a website's file system, but setting up and configuring Index Server can be challenging, especially when serving your website from a hosted environment. UltimateSearch makes adding search a breeze. Just drop the UltimateSearch assembly in the /bin directory and specify the indexing and crawling settings in a .config file and you're off and running. You don't need to register any component on the server; there's no configuration required (outside of that one .config file); you don't need to setup a Windows Service or schedule any tasks through Windows Scheduler; you don't need to have access to a database as the search index is stored in a file within your web application. In short, if you can FTP files to your website, you can use UltimateSearch.
What's more, UltimateSearch includes a Web control that you can drop onto a page to display a search user interface. With a few property settings you can enable advanced search UI features, such as auto-suggest and spell checking. No code necessary. It really is amazing how easy it is to add search to your site with UltimateSearch. Ok, ok, enough gushing about UltimateSearch.
In closing, if you are interested in learning more about UISuite or are in the process of evaluating third-party controls for your ASP.NET application, check out my whitepaper.
Happy Programming!