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

Chapter 9. Applying Themes

At this point in the book, you have been given a fair assessment of what goes into themes, have seen some of the stumbling blocks you may need to consider in planning your theme development approaches, and have hopefully learned to appreciate how powerful themes can be, even with the limitations they do in fact have.

But what have you seen so far in regard to applying themes is very limited. So as not to dilute the concepts of Chapter 8, there was not much mention of the actual application of themes in your projects. In fact, the only way documented was declaring the Theme or StyleSheetTheme attribute in your @Page directive. While it was alluded to that you can apply themes programmatically, nothing concrete was given on how to do this. And, beyond that, no concepts were really discussed or demonstrated. Again, it was with good reason; you needed to get a full understanding of how Themes work, how they are different from StyleSheetThemes, and which ones you want to use in your projects.

Now that you have a solid understanding of themes, though, it's time to delve deeper into how to actually apply the themes to your projects. Once this is completed, you should have all of the building blocks you need to be comfortable with incorporating themes into all of your future projects.

Before You Begin: Setting the Theme in the Master Page

Before you begin getting into the intricacies of setting your theme throughout your application, it is important to understand ...