Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 4. ASP.NET Server Controls and Client-Side Scripts

As you already know from earlier chapters, ASP.NET evolved from Microsoft's earlier Web technology called Active Server Pages (referred to as ASP then and classic ASP today). This model was completely different from today's ASP.NET. Classic ASP used interpreted languages to accomplish the construction of the final HTML document before it was sent to the browser. ASP.NET, on the other hand, uses true compiled languages to accomplish the same task. The idea of building Web pages based on objects in a compiled environment is one of the main focuses of this chapter.

This chapter looks at how to use a particular type of object in ASP.NET pages called a server control, and how you can profit from using this control. We also introduce a particular type of server control—the HTML server control. The chapter also demonstrates how you can use JavaScript in ASP.NET pages to modify the behavior of server controls.

The rest of this chapter shows you how to use and manipulate server controls, both visually and programmatically, to help with the creation of your ASP.NET pages.

ASP.NET Server Controls

In the past, one of the difficulties of working with classic ASP was that you were completely in charge of the entire HTML output from the browser by virtue of the server-side code you wrote. Although this might seem ideal, it created a problem because each browser interpreted the HTML given to it in a slightly different manner.

The two main browsers ...