Professional in C# and Visual Basic Part 12. Building on the revolutionary release, adds several key new developer features including AJAX, LINQ, and a new CSS designer in Visual Web Developer 2008. The dramatic reduction in code that developers realized from the more than 50 new server controls in now allows developers the time to make their applications more interactive with AJAX, to work with data in their preferred language with LINQ, and to build visually attractive and consistent standards-based sites with CSS. . | Server Controls and Client-Side Scripts As discussed in the previous chapter evolved from Microsoft s earlier Web technology called Active Server Pages referred to as ASP then and classic ASP today . This model was completely different from today s . Classic ASP used interpreted languages to accomplish the construction of the final HTML document before it was sent to the browser. on the other hand uses true compiled languages to accomplish the same task. The idea of building Web pages based on objects in a compiled environment is one of the main focuses of this chapter. This chapter looks at how to use a particular type of object in pages called a server control and how you can profit from using this control. We also introduce a particular type of server control the HTML server control. The chapter also demonstrates how you can use JavaScript in pages to modify the behavior of server controls. The rest of this chapter shows you how to use and manipulate server controls both visually and programmatically to help with the creation of your pages. Server Controls In the past one of the difficulties of working with classic ASP was that you were completely in charge of the entire HTML output from the browser by virtue of the server-side code you wrote. Although this might seem ideal it created a problem because each browser interpreted the HTML given to it in a slightly different manner. The two main browsers out there at the time were Microsoft s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. This meant that not only did developers have to be cognizant of the browser type to which they were outputting HTML but they also had to take into account which versions of those particular browsers might be making a request to their application. Some developers resolved the issue by creating two separate applications. When an end user made an initial request to the application the code made a browser check to see what .
