Almost there... Orcas better get this right.

It's a pretty old post... but it's a big internet and I haven't found the end yet. :)

David Ebbo explains how to distribute an ascx UserControl without having to distribute the actual ascx file.

And then a litany of comments with people having trouble getting the secret sauce to work just right.

To introduce this on my team, I need to be able to have an "ascx project" that fits into studio as a first-class member of the solution, and that produces an assembly that the other projects can refer to as a project reference.

I need this to have build automation, and a project model that I can let beginner-intermediate developers go to town on without having to understand all the underlying twiddling. It's just not quite there. So we're still doing "reference this assembly and copy these ascx files into your /controls directory". That blows, but the beginners can handle it.

There must be a universe that I am not exposed to where you would be allowed and would actually want to edit a code-behind, aspx, or ascx file on a live, production server. I can only imagine this scenario in a small business fiddling with their own little website. Those people can have the ascx UserControl. For bigger business development, we really just need and want resource-based full design-time support for a Web.Control.