Constructors!

The only thing that REALLY winds me up about ASP.NET is the near total lack of useful constructors

I'd guess a lot of people want to do something like:

ContentPanel1.Controls.Add( new LinkButton("link3", "This is the Text", "http://some.url") )

BUT! you can't. You have all the pain of:

LinkButton link3 = new LinkButton();
link3.ID = "link3";
link3.NavigateURL="http://some.url";
link3.Text = "This is the Text";
ContentPanel1.Controls.Add(link3);

Declaratively, its beautiful, but there are some things that you just CANNOT DO declaratively, or at least you need to seriously hurt youself to manage it. Obviously, you can write helpful methods to immitate a ctor, but i'd really love to see decent ctors in both ASP.NET and ATLAS - ASP.NET is released, so i assume i've got no luck until V3.0 for that, but ATLAS is very much in devel, so any chance of a constructor or two (one on ControlEventTrigger would be great!)

hello.

yes, i also believe that the asp.net controls should have constructors which receive parameters. i guess that the problem is defining the important ones...if you really write a lot of code like the one you've presented, then i believe that your current best option is to write a factory class for those controls...it sucks, but...

Hi Luis,

I totally agree with you. In fact, some ASP.NET controls do have constructors that take parameters, such as SqlDataSource, though most do not. The factory pattern is probably your best bet here, especially since it lets you define exactly the properties that are important toyou, which might not be the same as the properties we would have come up with.

Edit: I also opened a suggestion bug so that we can investigate doing this for our controls in a future CTP.

Thanks,

Eilon