This thesis presents the design and fabrication issues related to advanced fibre Bragg gratings with particular emphasis on realising novel devices with application to dispersion compensation. Developments of fabrication techniques presented herein resulted in the first demonstration of continuously-written metre-long chirped gratings. Subsequent development led to the realisation of gratings with deliberate spectral shaping (without affecting the group delay response) and the first demonstration of gratings designed to compensate both 2nd and 3rd order dispersion of dispersion-shifted fibre. Transfer of this fabrication technology to a commercial fabrication facility resulted in several successful system trials. Results are presented of the first demonstration of chirped FBGs with the application of dispersion-managed soliton transmission. Error-free transmission was obtained over 1000 km of non-dispersion shifted fibre. Application of a new reverse-engineering grating design concept has allowed the fabrication of gratings designed to meet the needs of DWDM dispersion compensation on a 50 GHz grid. The first experimental results of devices designed by this technique are presented, and have sufficient bandwidth utilisation for application in long-haul transmission and optically-transparent networks.