The Menu Control

The ubiquitous menu control needs little introduction. Menus provide users with a list of links from which to choose. They are traditionally placed either horizontally at the top of the page, or vertically on the left or right-hand side of the page. If you've built a website, chances are you've attempted to put a menu somewhere on the site either by using ready-to-use widgets or by building one entirely from scratch using a collection of scripts. Either way, a fair amount of code had to be written to get the menu working.

Creating menus with the menu control of ASP.NET 2.0 is a breeze. Let's add a couple of menus to the TropicalGreen site. We will start by building a static horizontal menu for the site's banner. Following that, we will attempt to do something a little more complex and build a dynamic vertical menu that displays sub-menus as popouts.

Building a Horizontal Menu

Static menus are easy to build. We could simply hard-code the links in the master page and the job...