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

Chapter 1. aesthNETics

Technology has continued to scream past us over the last few decades. What is top of the line now may be completely obsolete in six months. As soon as you begin to understand a new technology, updates to it come out and make the entire learning curve start over. This has certainly been true for .NET developers. When .NET was introduced it was an amazing improvement over previous Microsoft programming languages. The mere fact that VB and C programmers could understand each other's code should say something. But the incredible number of new controls and gizmos could prove daunting to a lot of people. Before anyone could get comfortable with .NET 1.0, 1.1 was released. When people finally started getting comfortable with 1.1, 2.0 was released. And now, barely a year after the 2.0 release, there is a new 3.0 coming out. Some programmers love the flux and constant improvements to the functionality of .NET. They strive to learn all of the new features and enhancements to see how they can improve the projects they produce. Others try to keep up only so that their projects stay current and to see what impact the new frameworks will have on their existing applications. Either way, most folks want to focus on the "under-the-hood" pieces of the framework. They want to determine if the new .NET 2.0 GridView really is that much better than the 1.1 DataGrid (it is). They can immediately see the benefits of implementing Try...Catch...Finally statements in their code.

But ...