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

Chapter 6. Consistent Navigation

Historically, web page developers have struggled with the art of mastering a consistent site navigation system that was easy to maintain and worked in all browsers. Although not unique in this regard, ASP and ASP.NET seemed almost impossible to get a menu to work right and act the way you wanted. Most people resorted to purchasing third-party controls or relying on straight text hyperlinks or possibly images to create their navigation. The brave would attempt to write their own hovering drop-down menus, probably in JavaScript or something similar.

But that was then. Today's .NET developers have an easily maintainable site navigation system and a variety of tools at their disposal for presentation to their customers. These developers no longer have to look any further than the standard toolbox of Visual Studio to have a powerfully simple and simply powerful set of navigation tools for their next project.

Overview: ASP.NET Navigation Controls

With the introduction of the .NET 2.0 Framework, Visual Studio integrated several controls to help developers create a consistent navigation system into the projects they develop. Specifically, these controls include a TreeView control, a Menu control, and a SiteMapPath control. These new controls literally allow developers to drag and drop complex navigation systems right onto their page, which remain very flexible and easily modifiable. And, maybe most importantly, these controls have CSS Friendly Control Adapter ...