Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#

Chapter 8. Custom Controls

At its core, ASP.NET is a control-based architecture, defined in the following way:

• A Page is a control.

• Any control may contain child controls.

• A control is rendered by rendering its contents and then iteratively rendering its children.

This architecture is analogous to the window architecture in the Win32 API. The desktop itself is a window (like the Page), and any window may contain child windows. Each window is rendered by first rendering its contents and then rendering the contents of its children. The rendering of a window on the desktop involves drawing pixels to a display, whereas the rendering of an ASP.NET control involves generating HTML to populate a portion of the response to an HTTP request. ASP.NET's control ...