ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Using Controls

Server controls have two distinct techniques for using a control in a Web Forms page that can be both useful and confusing: declarative and programmatic techniques. Each has its own purpose, and in some situations (such as when using code-behind), both techniques must be used.

Typically, when you write your pages without code-behind files, you use the declarative technique for using controls in your page. If you need to access those controls programmatically, you would do so by referring to the value of the control’s id attribute. For example, if you have an ASP.NET Label control declared as follows:

<asp:label id="Message" runat="server"/>

you would refer to this control in server-side code as follows:

<script runat="server">
   Sub Page_Load(  )
      Message.Text = "Hello, World!"
   End Sub
</script>

If you use code-behind with your pages, or if you wish to create a control dynamically at runtime, you may wish to declare and use a control programmatically, as shown here:

Dim Message As New Label(  )
Message.Text = "Hello, World!"
Page.Controls.Add(Message)

Declarative Control Use

Declarative control use is the simpler of the two techniques. Declarative control use utilizes HTML-like tags to declare a server control instance and uses attributes to set control properties. The location of the output of the server control is determined by where in the page the tag is located. This technique also allows HTML visual designers to move tags around, if necessary, without impacting the programmatic ...