Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 5. ASP.NET Web Server Controls

Of the two types ofserver controls, HTML server controls and Web server controls, the second is considered the more powerful and flexible. The previous chapter looked at how to use HTML server controls in applications. HTML server controls enable you to manipulate HTML elements from your server-side code. On the other hand, Web server controls are powerful because they are not explicitly tied to specific HTML elements; rather, they are more closely aligned to the specific functionality that you want to generate. As you will see throughout this chapter, Web server controls can be very simple or rather complex depending on the control you are working with.

This chapter introduces some of the available Web server controls. It concentrates on the Web server controls that were around during the ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 days; Chapter 6 explores the server controls that are newly available in ASP.NET 2.0. These chapters do not discuss every possible control because some server controls are introduced and covered in other chapters throughout the book.

The controls that were originally introduced with ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 still work as they did before. ASP.NET 2.0 is backward compatible with the previous two versions of ASP.NET. This means that the control code you wrote in those past versions will work in ASP.NET 2.0, but some of the controls you originally used may now have some additional functionality you may choose to take advantage of. This chapter also looks ...