Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 3 ■ WEB FORMS WITH ASP.NET 41
Listing 3-2. Viewing the Form in a Browser
You can see that the ASP.NET runtime recognized that it encountered the tag
by saying runat="server", and realized that the tag was a server control, not a raw HTML
tag. Therefore, it generated the required form, defaulting the method to HTTP-POST
and specifying itself (Default.aspx) as the agent (via the action attribute) to handle the
form feedback.
An HTML Forms Example in ASP.NET
The following example contains an ASP.NET form, which is a server-side control that
generates a client-side form, as well as a number of client-side form elements. If this is
confusing, don’t worry—it will soon become second nature. I’ve deliberately chosen this
complex scenario to demonstrate how ASP.NET makes it easy for you to mix and match
server-side and client-side functionality to make your work as easy as possible.
First, use VWDE to create a new web site. Open the default page that is created for
you for editing, and select Design view within the Visual Studio UI.
Now take a look at the Toolbox for the HTML controls. It should look something like
Figure 3-1. Remember that you are going to use the ASP.NET HTML controls, which have
a programming interface similar to the actual HTML controls they represent. (This is in
contrast to the standard ASP.NET controls, which ultimately generate HTML but have a
more robust programming interface.)