Beginning ASP.NET 4.5: in C# and VB

Chapter 3

Designing Your Web Pages

What you will learn in this chapter:

• What CSS is and why you need it
• How CSS looks and how to write it
• The different ways to add CSS code to your ASP.NET pages and to external files
• The numerous tools that VS offers you to quickly write CSS

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter on the Download Code tab at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118311809. The code is in the Chapter 3 download.

The pages you created in the previous two chapters look pretty plain and dull. That's because they lack styling information and therefore default to the standard layout that the browser applies. To spruce up your pages, you need a way to change their presentation in the browser. The most common way to do this is by using the cascading style sheets (CSS) language. CSS is the de facto language for formatting and designing information on the web, including ASP.NET web pages. With CSS you can quickly change the appearance of your web pages, giving them that great look that your design or corporate identity dictates.

Solid support for working with CSS was initially added in Visual Web Developer (VWD) 2008, one of the predecessors of VS Express 2012 for Web. This support has been further enhanced in the previous version of Visual Studio, VWD 2010. The new VS 2012 builds on top of this CSS support and improves it in a number of ways, making the CSS editor a first-class citizen in VS, with editor features similar ...