❑
handling page navigation
❑
styling pages and controls with CSS
If the list looks intimidating, don’t worry—all of this is far easier to understand
than it might first appear.
Web Forms
As you know, there’s always new terminology to master when you’re learning
new technologies. But with ASP.NET, even the simplest terms that are used to
describe the basics of web pages change to reflect the processes that occur within
them.
The term used to describe an ASP.NET web page is web form, and this is the
central object in ASP.NET development. You’ve already met web forms—they’re
the .aspx files you’ve worked with so far in this book. At first glance, web forms
look much like HTML pages, but in addition to static HTML content they also
contain ASP.NET presentational elements, and code that executes on the server
side to generate dynamic content and perform the desired server-side functionality.
Every web form includes a <form runat="server"> tag, which contains the
ASP.NET-specific elements that make up the page. Multiple forms aren’t suppor-
ted. The basic structure of a web form is shown here:
<html>
<head>
<script runat="server" language="language">
…code here…
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form runat="server">
…user interface elements here…
</form>
</body>
</html>
To access and manipulate a web form programatically, we use the
System.Web.UI.Page class. You might recognize this class from the code-behind
example we saw in Chapter 3. We must mention the class explicitly in the code-
behind file. In situations in which we’re not using code-behind files (i.e. we write
94
Chapter 4: Constructing ASP.NET Web Pages
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