Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter III.6. Laying Out Your Site

In This Chapter

Look at any Web site, and you're likely to see common elements, such as form-validation feedback, navigational aids, and consistent headers and footers. In previous versions of Visual Studio, you had to be conversant in technologies as varied as JavaScript and XML to provide these features. Thanks to many of the new features in Visual Studio and ASP.NET, you can create high-quality Web sites while writing a minimal amount of code.

This chapter gets you acquainted with themes, skins, and master pages and introduces you to the benefits of using CSS to lay out your Web pages. You can also see how to use the ASP.NET validation controls to test user input and provide feedback to users.

Keeping Track of Input with Validation Controls

After you create only a few Web forms, you'll realize that you need some way to make sure that all your check boxes are checked and your text boxes are filled with the right information. ASP.NET has a collection of validation controls to help you do just that.

Validation controls provide validation services for the controls you place on a Web page, ensuring that the data that's entered is in the correct format. The validation controls also enable you to give users feedback about the correct data. For example, a Web page can include text boxes to capture these input types from users:

• E-mail address

• Phone number

• Date of birth

How can you be sure that the values that are entered are in the proper formats? Further, how ...