.Net Framework Essentials

Web Form Syntax

Similar to Active Server Pages, Web Forms are text files consisting of HTML tags and other controlling tags such as directives and script blocks. The default extension for web forms is aspx ; however, you can use the IIS administration tool to map other file extensions explicitly with aspnet_isapi.dll to have them parsed and compiled when accessed, as if they were ASP.NET resources.

There are ten different syntax elements in ASP.NET; because most of them are carried over from ASP, we list here the familiar ones and discuss only those that are important in ASP.NET:

Directives

Code declaration blocks

Code rendering blocks

HTML control syntax

Custom control syntax

Data-binding expressions

Server-side object tags

Server-side include directives

Server-side comments

Literal text

Directives

Previously, all ASP directives were formatted as <%@ [ attribute=value ] ⁺ %> because there was only one type of directive.^[43]

ASP.NET adds a number of directives to ASP.NET files. With the new list of directives—Page, Control, Import, Register, Assembly, and OutputCache—the syntax for directive is now <%@ directive [ attribute=value ] ⁺ %>. All of the old ASP directives are attributes under the Page directive. If you use the old syntax by omitting the directive name, the attribute/value pairs will be applied to the default directive, which is Page.

@ Page

In addition to containing all previous ASP directives (CodePage, EnableSessionState, Language, LCID, and Transaction), the ASP.NET ...