I must say that master pages are really really cool. At first I was concerned that Master Pages was going to force everything that you did to be in tables thus taking CSS out of the picture. I was mainly concerned about this because I can see the benefits that CSS can offer to web developers and want to use this really cool and useful technology.

When I first saw Master Pages being used I would look at the code and see almost nothing but tables being used for positioning of objects and it was annoying because after all I want to use CSS. So I proceeded to start and learn CSS anyway hoping that I could just override the default output that Master Pages used.

Well I have learned quite a bit about CSS now, basically I am confident with it, and just took a look at Master Pages. I must say I was impressed by them the blew me away with the possibilities. I am still learning them so some of the problems I forsee are probably solved. Let me first explain a little bit about master pages first.

Master Pages is a new technology in ASP.NET 2.0 that allows for a unified look and feel of a website without having to go in and customize individual pages, which can take up hours. With master pages you make a sing master page that has the look and feel you want across all pages such as the most common things menu, banner, and footer. Now user controls reduced the time it took to do this significantly, but Master Pages is just where it is at.

Now CSS offers pretty much the same thing. You make up your classes for your divs with positioning font information yada yada yada. Now Master Pages makes it faster than CSS, but if it outputs to tables, then where are the web standards? This was my big worry. I want to make standards compliant websites using ASP.NET.

Well here is the cool part. You can use CSS to do the layouts on the Master Page. In fact Master Pages compliments CSS and vice versa. You now only have to make the CSS file, and apply all the classes and ids to one file instead of 20. Now tell me that is not awesome.

What does this mean?

Well it increases the possibilities of standards compliant ASP.NET websites. It allows for less time in development because now you can focus more on the code that is important instead of menial looks. You can now write the whole backend for that amazon.com clone and don’t have to worry about the useless front end.

Ok, this is just a random thought, but I was thinking and I kind of predict some serious open source vs. proprietary wars coming within the next 10 years. I don’t mean the current geek bickering that you see all the time or the current enterprise level use Linux for blah. I truly see that normal users will become more educated on what open source software is and some beginning to switch to it. At that point I see 2 things happening.

1) Because so many people will be switching back and forth and there won’t necessarily be a winner on either side software is going to get better in general due to competition.

2) This will lead to the spilling out of the geek communities back and forth to the normal end users that don’t know much.

In business, especially in computers, there needs to be a power pushing the way. I think that there is going to be a power struggle, but I don’t know who is going to be there in the struggle for sure. I think that the company that offers the best mix between both OSS and Proprietary, like Red Hat, will come out on top. I don’t however see Microsoft fading into the distance any time soon much like IBM didn’t die when Microsoft took over. I do see them stepping back into second or third place restructuring for the new trends, and then I see them pushing innovation in some areas, mainly development.

I say this as an honest prediction of what I see. I could be totally off on my thoughts. It will be interesting to see what happens.

*This in no way means I love Microsoft and hate open source or vise versa. I love both and see the benefits of both.

Well I went to the MSDN launch party yesterday for SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 and I must say WOW.

It was awesome. The demos were incredible it was absolutely amazing some of the things that were show. Like the building of a complete data driven website with the capabilities of users logging in, registering, and personal preferences without a single line of code. That to me was amazing. I honestly can’t wait to get started with ASP.NET 2.0. Actually, I should be starting this week sometime with a redesign of Lhand.com.

As part of the bonus of going to the launch party I got two cool pieces of software, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Both are the coolest products in the world, and retail together at 6300 dollars. That, my friends is a lot of money. Not to mention the Resource DVD they gave away with 8 gig of content for learning these new products. I am seeing a lot of cool things coming from having these new products. I can’t wait to get started, especially figuring out Atlas (AJAX), and RSS. From what I understand both are super easy to implement in ASP.NET 2.0

Well need to get to work reading up on this stuff so until next time. Happy coding

Buddy Lindsey

DotNetNuke Blogs – No Respect for Windows Open Source

Woohoo someone who is fighting back agianst Microsoft haters saying unless it is linux it isn’t true opensource.

Shaun Walker reems the people who claim that unless it runs on all opensource software then it is not truely open source. He is fighting and IMO produces one of the most solid arguments I have ever seen.

To me this is a landmark argument for Windows based Open Source projects.

I mean why can’t windows, which has the largest market share of desktop os, have OSS? I mean I would think that starting people out using OSS on windows would be the first step to prove that OSS is good and that eventually you should try other OSS such as Linux.

Anyway I highly suggest you read the post.