ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Understanding Control Trees

In the previous section, you learned that an ASP.NET page is actually the source code for a .NET class. Alternatively, you can think of an ASP.NET page as a bag of controls. More accurately, because some controls might contain child controls, you can think of an ASP.NET page as a control tree.

For example, the page in Listing 1.13 contains a DropDownList control and a Button control. Furthermore, because the <%@ Page %> directive has the Trace="true" attribute, tracing is enabled for the page.

Listing 1.13. ShowControlTree.aspx

When you open the page in Listing 1.13 in your browser, you can see the control tree for ...