HtmlGenericControl(“a”) vs. HtmlAnchor

Question

I was looking into why one of my applications was running quite slowly. The application generates and displays a grid and populates it with work tasks (rendered as table cells). Inside each task there is an <a href="... which brings up some more info about the task.

As this is all built up dynamically from the codebehind, I've used HTMLTableRows/Cells to create the rows and cells, then used the Controls properties to add HTMLAnchors . Whenever I'm setting attributes I've used HTMLAnchor.HRef , HTMLTableCell.ColSpan , etc.

I noticed that if I use the generic HTMLGenericControl and then use its Attributes collection, eg

HTMLGenericControl a = new HTMLGenericControl("a");
a.Attributes["href"] = task.getLink();

it runs significantly quicker than what I would have thought is the preferred way of doing the same thing:

HtmlAnchor a = new HTMLAnchor;
a.HRef = task.getLink();

Does anyone have any explanation for where this apparent extra 'overhead' comes from?

EDIT

In case anyone is confused by my explanation, I posted another question for the same project, which has a screenshot .

Answer 1

@subkamran I had the same thought, but after looking it up, actually both HTMLAnchor and HTMLGenericControl are sub-classed from the same parent: HTMLContainerControl . One significant difference is that HTMLAnchor implements the IPostBackEventHandler to handle the "ServerClick" event. This surely adds something to the slowness...