When an ASP.NET page runs, the page goes through a life cycle in which it performs a series of processing steps. These include initialization, instantiating controls, restoring and maintaining state, running event handler code, and rendering. It is important for you to understand the page life cycle so that you can write code at the appropriate life-cycle stage for the effect you intend.

If you develop custom controls, you must be familiar with the page life cycle in order to correctly initialize controls, populate control properties with view-state data, and run control behavior code. The life cycle of a control is based on the page life cycle, and the page raises many of the events that you need to handle in a custom control.

This topic contains the following sections:

• General Page Life-cycle Stages
  
  
• Life-cycle Events
  
  
• Additional Page Life Cycle Considerations
  
  
• Catch-Up Events for Added Controls
  
  
• Data Binding Events for Data-Bound Controls
  
  
• Login Control Events