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.