The Page class itself inherits from the Controls class. The Controls class has a property called Controls, which is a collection representing the controls on the ASP.NET Web page. These are the controls we mentioned earlier and the event code triggered by these controls is where most of the rest of your programming effort will go.
You can use something as simple as Notepad to create the ASP.NET code and use FTP to upload it to the server but you would have to do a lot of coding and you would probably never be able to create programs as great as the ones that you can build with a sophisticated development environment such as Web Matrix, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and others. But the standard for function and performance remains Visual Studio .NET. The examples in this tutorial are created using Visual Studio .NET 2003. The "soon to be released" (or perhaps, "released" by the time you read this) Visual Studio .NET 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 will change things even more.
Like VB.NET, the ASP.NET architecture gives you access to everything in the .NET Framework you can build any kind of system you need. This is another "no limits" technology. The next section of this tutorial will start to dig into some of the things that you can do with the .NET Framework treasure chest and ASP.NET!
