3.4. The Page Class

Now that you've explored the page life cycle and learned how a page contains controls, it's worth pointing out that the page itself is also instantiated as a type of control object. In fact, all web forms are actually instances of the ASP.NET Page class, which is found in the System.Web.UI namespace.

You may have already figured this out by noticing that every code-behind class explicitly derives from System.Web.UI.Page. This means that every web form you create is equipped with an enormous amount of out-of-the-box functionality. The FindControl() method and the IsPostBack property are two examples you've seen so far. In addition, deriving from the Page class gives your code the following extremely useful properties: