Meeting Themes, Skins, and Styles

A theme is composed of skins and styles. Skins are web user controls (files with the .ascx extension) containing a number of controls that generate the dynamic part of the page (such as information retrieved from the database).

The following screenshot (Design view of Visual Studio .NET) shows how the skin file generating an article is built. You can see the skin file, which contains a number of controls (such as Title, Author, BriefDescription, and so on) that create the actual output:

Styles are standard Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. Simply said, a CSS file contains a set of rules that define how different page elements such as headers, links or normal text look. This book assumes you’re already familiar with CSS, but in case you aren’t, there are many tutorials on the Internet, such as the one at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style.

Visual Studio .NET contains editors for both .ascx controls (skins) and .css files (styles).

InChapter 3 you learned...