In this post, I'll continue my discussion of the construction of a new web site for ImaginaryRealities.com by discussing how I'm going to use ASP.NET themes to style and configure the "look" for my new web site. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new feature called themes which allows responsibilities on a web site to be truly separated between a developer that implements functionality and a designer that implements style. Using themes, the same web site can take on several different looks through a simple modification of the Web.config or application setting in a production environment. New looks can also be easily developed and deployed without making modifications to the existing web site. This post will discuss what ASP.NET themes are, how they work, and how they can be used in an ASP.NET web site or application. More...

In my last post, I discussed using the Yahoo! User Interface Library to start designing an ASP.NET web site. In my next post, I'll continue that discussion. But first, there's a little housekeeping chore that I want to discuss related to maximizing the amount of people that can view your web site. ASP.NET, and in general the entire .NET platform and Windows, all have rich support for globalization and localization. I like to think of globalization and localization as the creation of multicultural applications and web sites. Using globalization and localization, applications, or in this case web sites, can be used across multiple languages and cultures while respecting the specific cultural requirements, and without changing any code. More...

The hardest part of starting a new web site design is coming up with the killer layout for the site. There are many issues to consider when designing site and implementing the design. Do you use table-based layouts or CSS layouts? If you use CSS layouts do you float specific columns to the left or right side? How big should the page or columns be? What order do I need to put the content in the web page in order to maximize the search engine optimization? How do I do a negative margin to move my secondary content before my primary content? Fortunately, the wonderful developers at Yahoo! thought up some of these issues for you already and provide a great open source toolkit to help take some of these decisions away and make the implementation quicker and much, much easier. More...

Below is the illustration of the new architecture that I would like to build for the new ImaginaryRealities.com web site:

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In my last post, I discussed what my production environment looks like for ImaginaryRealities.com. In this post, I'll discuss my development environment that I'm using to build the ImaginaryRealities.com web site. I won't focus so much on the hardware than on the software and tools that I'm using to build the web site. More...

Whenever one starts a new software project, it's important to understand exactly what kind of environment the eventual software will be installed into. Understanding the production environment is very important when it comes to making design and implementation decisions that may affect how the software is installed, operates, and is used. More...

So I started, then life got in the way and I had to take a break. Work picked up as I finally got sent to a billable client and started getting utilized as a Neudesic consultant, so of course, paying the bills and trying to do a good job got into the way of my extracurricular activities. At least I've still been Twittering on a somewhat almost regular basis. So what have I been doing? Completing my first Microsoft CRM project and learning some really cool new technologies. More...