sapator: tried that, didn't work, same result.

Gep: also tried LoadControl, same result again.

It seems to be impossible

The reason I want it like this is because BaseControl is a generic control. It represents a filter on a particular type. It has a dropdown (amongst other controls) that shows a list of possible values for the generic type, and handles all the filtering on the selected value internally (a method that accepts a list of items and returns those that match the selected item ). Then I have one class inheriting BaseControl for each type.

The generics are not the problem by the way, tried it without genetics too and same result.

I let this idea go and just pit all the filtering code on the page itself. A lot more and repeated code but it works...