Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

4.6. Summary

This chapter gives you a good look at the large set of ASP.NET Server Controls. Since these controls are so important and used throughout every ASP.NET application, it's really critical that you understand what controls you have available in the Toolbox and what they are used for.

Many of the server controls share a large feature set. This makes it easy to understand new controls once you understand the basic set of rules and behaviors. This way, you can quickly familiarize yourself with third-party controls that you can download from the Internet as a ready-to-be-used component or as raw source.

Since server controls live at the server, you have to specify them in your ASP.NET pages with a Runat attribute set to Server. This way, the ASP.NET runtime knows how to deal with the control. During the processing of an ASP.NET page, the runtime asks each control for its HTML. The combined HTML for all controls in the page is eventually sent to the browser, where it's used to build up the user interface that the visitor sees.

Because there are so many ASP.NET Server Controls, they are logically grouped together in different categories in the Toolbox of VWD. The Standard category of the Toolbox contains the controls you're likely to use most. This category includes common controls like Button, DropDownList, Label, and HyperLink. With these controls, you can rapidly create fully functional Web Forms that allow a user to enter data in many different ways that can be submitted ...