Question

In general, I am wondering when to use custom controls vs integrating the control directly into your form.

In particular, I have a form that contains a tab page, with 6 tabs each containing a number of .net framework controls. Currently, I have in my project 6 user defined controls that I dock onto each of those tab pages.
I.e. there is no reuse of controls, I just use them to manage the complexity of a form that would otherwise contain 10 gridviews, 20 buttons, 6 date controls, etcetera. Would you consider this a good way to manage this complexity, or would other alternatives be better (in enabling the programmer to
understand what is going)?

Answer 1

I think this kind of division of page to custom/usercontrols may prove to be useful even without reusing the parts. This gives you:

1. Encapsulation – you can hide the boring plumbing and fragile internal state from higher level code, leaving you a much cleaner set of controls to work with and more business-oriented code on page level.
2. Separation of concerns – you can make pieces which are simple, yet logically whole.
3. Readiness for reuse – may never become useful but it does make you feel more powerful 😉

But be aware that this can backfire if your components are not properly named and grouped, badly designed, you use lots of dynamic loading, do not provide good API or nesting goes too deep. I have seen it happen in a legacy app and it wasn’t helpful that way.

If done well, worth it. With inexperienced/sloppy team members, better don’t.