C#® Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET

ASP.NET's Control Model

In QuickBasic, your code dealt with the screen as a long piece of paper to which you sent output. You may have used screen libraries that encapsulated a lot of this functionality and made it a much higher-level operation with better positioning.

With the advent of Visual Basic, you moved into a world of reusable controls. You designed your UI by dragging and dropping controls onto a design surface instead of outputting text to the screen or drawing polygons.

These controls were objects that had methods and properties that were used to customize their display and functionality. ASP.old was in many ways similar to QuickBasic. The entire page is essentially treated as a long piece of paper onto which your code placed content. ...