Duration: 18 minutes
Summary: In this video, we start our discussion on themes. If you think about master pages as the structure of your site, the theme will be the look and feel of the controls on your site. When creating web sites, you could be interested in having the same look for a specific control (for example, a grid). To do so, you add a Theme folder to your web site from the list of specific folders. In the Theme folder you create skin files. You can create a skin file for every control, or one skin file that contains all the controls. At the end, ASP.NET will compile all the skins into one theme class. Then what would we put in a skin file? Well, we put there the control we are interested in and all the properties that we would like to apply to this control across the pages. Then, when we want to use that specific skin on a control, we add the Theme property to the Page directive on the top of the page with the name of the skin we are interested in. We can also create named skins (with a skin id). That way we can use the default skin (the one without the id) with some controls and use the one with a specific skin id to override the default.
Methodology of the development of example: Good coding standard and simplified design to illustrate the key points.
Technology Used: ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2010
Keyword: ASP.NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, Skin, Theme, TextBox, MasterPage, SkinId.