This article will serve as an introduction to developing custom server controls, but it is by no means meant for people who do not have a decent understanding of C#.

In this article I'll guide you through the creation of a guestbook that you can use on your site or whatever. The guestbook will be organized like this:

• GuestbookForm.cs - This will be the control that allows users to sign the guestbook
• GuestbookRepeater.cs - This will be the control that displays all the entries in the guestbook
• XmlEngine.cs - This class will control the retrieval and insertion of guestbook entries from the XML file
• Guestbook.xml - This XML file will hold all the guestbook entries

Ok, we're just about ready to start developing this little application, but I just though I'd mention that the XmlEngine class will not be described in detail as I assume you understand what is going on there when you see it.
Well enough of this, let's start off by developing our XmlEngine class then...