Once our control is added, we need to make a few very small changes to the CodeBehind file. The MVC framework provides us the flexibility to use a strongly-typed generic version of the ViewUserControl class, much like the ViewPage class. The difference between ViewUserControl and ViewUserControl is that in the generic version you explicitly define the Type of ViewData you will be passing to your UserControl. If you choose to use the non-generic version the ViewData property will be a simple dictionary of objects, instead of strongly-typed properties.
Lets go ahead and tell our UserControl we will be passing it an instance of the AccountViewData class I created. I also added a simple automatic property called SelectedItem that we will use to specify which menu item should be "selected." We will use this property in a future post.