Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages

Appendix A. Microsoft Visual Studio Codename "Orcas"

If you are reading this book, and certainly if you are reading this appendix, you have the only truly quintessential tool necessary for being a good developer: you want to learn. Maybe you picked up this book to get a better handle on general design issues for web design and perhaps you wanted to get a better perspective on how .NET can help handle those issues. Maybe you wanted to get a book on themes or Master Pages or maybe even the CSS Friendly Control Adapters. Or maybe (hopefully) someone told you how great this book is and you just couldn't live without it (that is obviously the best scenario). But regardless of your reason, you probably paid money for this book in the hope that you would learn something you didn't already know and have intentions of using the book again as a reference in your future development endeavors. You bought it to learn.

As part of this learning, it is important to understand not only the current state of technology, but also its future. Sure, for the most part, you probably picked up this book because you wanted to learn how to use the tools that are currently in the market for developing .NET 2.0 web projects. And, hopefully, you did exactly that as you read through the other chapters of this book.

But what will serve you best in your career (or hobby) as a programmer is to be prepared for the future. In 1970, Alan Kay, often considered the father of object-oriented programming, said "the best ...