Question

I couldn’t find anything through Google, I suppose the search terms are too much to handle.
The VS built-in help only explains <%, which is just embedded code. There is no mention of <%:

EDIT:
My book says, that the only difference is that <%: returns a MvcHtmlString. Why do we need an extra symbol for <%: just to return something?

EDIT2:
An example:

<% Html.RenderAction("xxx", "xxx"); %>

Nothing is returned, that’s why we have to say <%, because it would htmlencode? But what if I render something in .RenderAction() that needs to be htmlencoded too? Or does that not make sense?

Thanks for any help! It would really help me to understand asp.net.

Answer 1

As indicated in other answers, it is for Html encoding. Here’s a blog entry explaining.