Summary

This chapter looked at the second major set of server controls that are provided as part of the default ASP.NET installation “the Web Form controls. These are a mixture of simple controls that emulate the HTML controls you looked at in the previous chapter, and more complex controls that provide 'rich' output containing more than one HTML element.

The Web Form controls also have other advantages over the HTML controls. They provide a consistent object model, using the same property name in all the controls for the same 'value'. An example is the Text property that sets the visible text within the control irrespective of which HTML element is output, and which HTML attribute carries the text content. This makes working with them easier, and also simplifies the task of building tools or applications that will create a user interface automatically.

The Web Form controls examined in this chapter fall into three groups:

• The basic controls, such as Image , Hyperlink , TextBox , and RadioButton .

• The list controls, such as ListBox , DropDownList , and RadioButtonList .

• The rich controls, such as AdRotator , Calendar , and Xml .

We showed you the common properties for each one, and demonstrated them through a sample application. You also saw how to react to events that these controls expose, and some of the other issues involved when you use them.

However, we didn't examine all the list controls in this chapter, as there are some very complex ones, such as Repeater , DataList , and DataGrid . These are covered in the next chapter.