Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net 2003 (Code name "WHIDBEY") offers few of the coolest and most awaited features...

Did anyone of you while developing web applications faced following situation -
"You are developing a website for a certain client... There are certain standard controls, images and layouts that are going to be repeated across various pages. You have to make the allignment of all the images and those repeated control everytime. Some developers of your group do it differently and you spend quite some time in formatting so that everyone's pages look in similar lines... If yes then read ahead...
Also that sometimes some controls refuse to get a particular font in particular size displayed on them.. You try to do all kindof settings at design time but still at runtime your one control looks like an odd man out....Your overall asthetic appeal of your site is spoilt..."

Now there is an answer to these situations in the new release of VS.Net "Whidbey"... Now you have got MASTER PAGES... These pages will work somewhat similar to "Slide Master" in Microsoft Powerpoint. You can make a Master page for your project and make all the rest of the pages to inherit from this Master Page. The VISUAL INHERITANCE which was not possible earlier in web pages comes alive with Master Pages. You can place your standard banners, Log out links, Help links, Tool bars, Footers for pages etc etc in your Master page and there would be all the rest of your pages inheriting from Master Page have the same controls, same images at the same places. Your development time is reduced drastically, there will be consistency in all your pages giving asthetic appeal to your pages without efforts.

The other situation discussed earlier is solved by SKINS and THEMES.... Analogy here is your windows desktop themes... There will be inbuilt skins and themes available in "Whidbey" which when you simply apply to your web applications they will get an enhanced looks... Well to define these... SKIN can be said as the set of properties and templates that can used to set the size, font, color etc of various controls. When you include some set of skins or stylesheets to change the overall look of a website... then that becomes a THEME... You can even pack themes & skins and apply them to other websites by just transferring them...

Could it get further easier so early???....

- Vishal Joshi
Microsoft MVP .Net