How ASP.NET Works

I'm learning ASP.NET and it would be a great help if I understood the internal workings of this technology. I'm not asking for the architecture of IIS or anything. My interests can be described as follows:

What is the order of execution of an aspx page?

Where do (custom) controls fit in to this ordering?

Why must controls runat="server" or even be xml for that matter?

What must be done to controls to make them IDE friendly like the TextBox control?

Does ASP.NET run more like an application or a standard website?

If somewhere in between, in what ways?

Obviously I have much to learn. Any help would be great. Any pointers to tutorials, etc. would be very useful too.

Thanks

You wrote: Why must controls runat="server" or even be xml for that matter? What must be done to controls to make them IDE friendly like the TextBox control?

No, controls do not have to run at server, in fact you can use the good old html controls with .net technology as well as the new and improved serverside controls.

But by using serverside controls the .net framework will render the output of your controls according to the clients specification.

For instance : If a browsers supports absolute positioning of objects the html send to the browser will contain markup with absolute positioning, a browser call without that ability will receive html witch uses tables to acheive the same result.

Serverside controls thereby eliminate crossbrowser adaption problems and furthermore they support the full eventmodel of structured objectorianted languages like Visual Basic.net Java# and C# So you no longer need to rely on script languages but can implement the full power of a compiled fully structured programminglanguage