It has taken me a long time to do this, but GrannetDotNet is now written in ASP.NET 2.0. I wanted to use some of the new functionality of ASP.NET 2.0 to dress the site up a bit, so the first thing that I have implemented is Themes.

The site comes out of the box in the default "Blue" theme. Creativity with images has never really been a specialty of mine, so I found a few pieces of artwork from a stock library online. The images came in 2 seperate colors, so I thought I would use these colors as the basis for my themes. I am not very good at coming up with original artwork, but if I have something to work off of, I can come up with some decent graphic concepts. The site is also available in an "Orange" theme and you can test drive the themes on the homepage. There are LinkButton controls in the center of the homepage that allow you to view the homepage in either of the two themes. As of right now you can only change the theme of the homepage. Since ASP.NET applies the Theme in the PreInit event handler of the Page I have to specify the default theme in the Web.Config file. The theme technology in 2.0 is great but Microsoft missed out on one major piece of functionality: I can't change the theme using the PreInit event handler from a MasterPage. To me this seems like a HUGE disadvantage. Many of the pages of the site have the CompilationMode set to "Never" so they don't have a CodeFile associated with them. They derive their theme from the Web.Config, but in my opinion this should be able to be overridden by the MasterPage. This would allow a great deal of personalization to visitors if you could read a cookie with the specified theme and change the whole site accordingly by specifying code in the MasterPage to perform this rather than insert boilerplate code in every page in the application. Anyhow, that's my 2 cents :)

Take a look at the site and let me know what you think. I will be investigating the use of Web Parts for certain pages too, just to show off some of what 2.0 can do!