Summary

In this chapter, you have seen a list of the controls that are part of ASP.NET and how they fall into categories based not only on their use, but also on the way that you work with them and write code to interact with them. A good example of this is the common approach used to access and manipulate the contents of the simple list controls such as ListBox, DropDownList, and BulletedList.

You will have come across many of the controls in earlier, more task-focused chapters, and you will see them all again many times throughout the remainder of this book. However, you should now have a better grasp of why there are different sets of controls and how they differ.

Another important issue covered in this chapter is how you choose the appropriate control when building your pages. There appear to be several controls that do the same thing, such as HtmlAnchor, Hyperlink, ImageMap, and ImageButton. In this chapter, you saw how to make a decision about which type of server control to chooseand, in fact, when not to use a server control at all.

The chapter finished with a brief overview of the underlying architecture of ASP.NET, discussing the event-driven model and the way that it relies on request and response information. In the next chapter, you will explore this topic in more detail as you look at the Page class that implements the ASP.NET page object, and see the features it provides for streamlining your page operation. This includes ways of presenting a uniform appearance across multiple pages.