Chapter 3: The Page Rendering Model

Chapter 3

The Page Rendering Model

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

• Work directly with server-side control tags

• Create a Web site with Visual Studio

• Work with Web forms and server-side controls using Visual Studio

• Work with post-back events using Visual Studio

This chapter covers the heart of ASP.NET's Web Forms rendering model: controls. As we'll see here, System.Web.UI.Page works by partitioning the rendering process into small components known as server-side controls.

The entire tour of the ASP.NET control model will look at the fundamental control architecture. We'll start by looking at the HTML required to render controls in the browser. We'll take a very quick look at the classic ASP approach to displaying controls (and some of the problems there). This will lay the groundwork for following chapters in which we'll look at how controls can provide custom rendering, user controls, some of the standard UI controls, and the new ASP.NET 2.0 controls. We'll start with the ASP.NET rendering model.