Adding a re-usable 'box' to my asp.net web app

Question

I'm building a basic web application in ASP.NET 4.0 with C# in Visual Studio 2010 Pro. I'm still very new to C#, and am used to Delphi coding. My website already has registration/login, and although I use some asp.net controls, a majority of my pages are dynamically loaded from my SQL database and I manually compile the HTML code from C# and insert it into the document.

Now what I would like to do is implement a poll - or a vote box - an 'object' which can be re-used in different pages. My website's master page already has a permanent left panel which has things which show on every page. One of these will be a small box with a vote of a few questions.

All I need to know is how do I begin to build an independent plugin control for a web page like this? I don't necessarily mean a separate DLL or anything, my existing one can handle everything. But I'd like to re-use the same little voting box in different pages too. So I'm assuming this will be considered a separate page, in a way, which is probably about 120 pixels wide by 80 high. Each vote will be limited to either login account or ip address (which I already have access to). So this solution must interact with the existing asp.net application.

So how do I begin the 'backbone' of such a plugin which can be re-used in multiple pages? I do not plan on distributing this plugin, and I don't even know if this is the correct term for what I need. Just a 'box' which can be 're-used' on multiple pages - which must interact with the asp.net app.

To better explain what I mean, imagine how Facebook has the plugin where you can embed some general info about likes and such. I'd like to make my own box like this - and even be able to embed it in other websites.

Answer 1

It sounds like you just need to make the poll into a user control. The documentation should get you started with them. A control can access everything an ASP.NET page can when it comes to the login information. It won't handle embedding into other pages though – embeddable active content that authenticates against your site is a nontrivial problem.

As I said in the comment, if most of your HTML is creates as a blob that's opaque to ASP.NET, it will probably be nontrivial to insert a user control into the middle of it.