ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 8. Themes, Skins, and Localization

Designing a consistent and friendly user interface for a web application is an integral part of every developer’s job. Yet, this seemingly easy job requires a lot of planning and architecting to ensure a clean separation of UI from business logic.

Note

Learn how to maintain a consistent look and feel for your web site by creating themes and skins for your web server controls.

Create Themes and Skins

Most web designers use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to give their web sites a consistent look and feel. In ASP.NET 2.0, you can now create themes and skins that extend a consistent look and feel to your server controls. In this lab, you will learn how to create skins for your web controls and how to group them into themes.

Themes Versus CSS Stylesheets

While both themes and CSS stylesheets let you apply common sets of attributes to web pages, they do have their differences:

• Themes can define properties of controls, such as the images to be used for an ImageMap control. CSS stylesheets, on the other hand, can define only certain sets of style properties.

• Theme property values always override local property values, while stylesheets can cascade.

Note that you can use themes and CSS together.

Themes and skins allow you to cleanly separate your UI into layers, separating form from function. This greatly increases the manageability of your project.

How do I do that?

In this lab, you’ll create some skin files and group them into a theme. Then, you’ll apply ...