Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

14.1. Site Maps

If your website has more than a handful of pages, you'll probably want some sort of navigation system to let users move from one page to the next. Obviously, you can use the ASP.NET toolkit of controls to implement almost any navigation system, but this requires that you perform all the hard work. Fortunately, ASP.NET has a set of navigation features that can simplify the task dramatically.

As with all the best ASP.NET features, ASP.NET navigation is flexible, configurable, and pluggable. It consists of three components:

• A way to define the navigational structure of your website. This part is the XML site map, which is (by default) stored in a file.

• A convenient way to read the information in the site map file and convert it to ...