Uniformaty

[Mr Newbie]

Now I know that VS2005 has master pages and webparts etc etc. However, at
present I am forced to work with VS2003 so I have a couple of basic
questions related to the subject matter for which I am hoping to acheive
inspirationan and or direction.

I want to create my new site with a high degree of consistancy and
managability. The perfect way to do this is to choose something other than
asp.net 2003 to do it in, like I dont know , lets say front page for example
where I can use dynamic templates to create editable areas much the same as
I do on 2005 ( If i were able to use it ). But thats not the case.

So, Im trying to devise a way to acheive this. As far as I am aware, I cant
inherit aspx forms, so this leaves me with ( AFAIK ) creating a template to
copy from and then altering the code for each new page.

I dont want to use Includes or Frames, OR MS Positioning, so Im thinking
about using Flow layout panels and adding custom controls to do the menus
etc.

Does anyone have any pearls of wisdom for me before I go ahead and get
myself in a whole heap of trouble ?

PS: If any of my assertions above are incorrect, Im sure ( and hope ) that
someone will let me know.

 

[Andrew Robinson]

I don't use FrontPage for much of anything. I think that for the right
crowd, it is a good application but I believe that it will template your
look and feel by copying pages. If you want to make a change later, you will
have to make a lot of manual changes.

You can certainly use VS2003 to achieve the "master page" feel without much
effort. Many of us did it for years and there is likely more than one way of
achieving this.

I did it by creating a series of User Controls that contained my header,
menu and footer for each page. I would then have to insert these at the
correct location on any given page. The only gacha is that if you use
partial HTML tables within your user controls, the IDE will at times attemp
to complete them. So edit your template user controls with care.

-Andrew