For several days, I have struggled with a problem with the view state on dynamically loaded controls. I am using a fair number of dynamic controls on a little project that I have been working. Everything was working fine except in one section. In this one section, view state was not being tracked until after the first post back. Events were not responding until after the first post back. Everything seemed to be setup properly and it was working everywhere else. Very perplexing. Who ever heard of...

Through much trial and error and research on the web, I have come up with the guidelines for dealing with dynamically loaded controls. Load the controls in the same order on each post back Add new controls to the Controls array before setting any properties. Properties set before the control is added to the control array will not be tracked in View State. If an event handled after dynamic controls are added causes diferent controls to be loaded, the newly reloaded controls may need to be explicitely...

Here are some guidelines that I have started following to structure pages and get the style sheets right. I have found it useful to have one style sheet for the web site that sets the color schemes, fonts, and page structure as well as any other UI constraints that would be common across all pages in the site. I then add a new style sheet for each page to handle positioning information specific to that page. This seems to keep the style sheets more manageable while still keeping the content separate...

I found this great presentation covering how to structure a style sheet. Andrew Krespanis steps through various details such as fluid layout, structuring containers, cross browser style sheet support, font scaling, and behaviour within form elements. A great dal of very useful information very well structured and written

I have always been much more worried about how the software that I write works. Stability, accuracy, scalability, etc were always much more important to me than the choice of font, color, filters on the images, etc. Recently I have had several people tell me that it doesn't matter how well a piece of software works. If it doesn't look sharp, it will loose some credibility. Let's face it, most people don't get to see the most impressive aspects of the software we write. Having thought about it more,...

Purists will argue about a strict separation of format/ presentation from content, but if you are not a “purist” why should you care? Several reasons, Much more dynamic layout. Witness the skins on any blog server. With tables to control layout, imagine the changes required to move navigation from the left of the page to the right of the page. Using style sheets, you simply have to change one attribute of one style class. As a more extreme case, consider having to change a form with labels...