I gave a quick Firestarter talk at the San Francisco .Net user group yesterday about .less. .less (‘dot-less’) is an open source .Net library, which extends the functionality of CSS (it works with your existing CSS files), adding features like variables, using a syntax close to CSS. If you find that working with CSS causes some teeth-grinding , you should probably have a look!

Download the slide deck here

When I decided to have a 2-level horizontal menu for my professional webpage in ASP.NET, it came as a surprise to me that this wasn’t completely straightforward. I expected the standard  ASP menu control to support this, but found out that this wasn’t the case.

Fortunately, I came across a post by Peter Kellner, describing how he implemented that for the Silicon Valley Code Camp website, which was pretty much what I envisioned.

The one issue I had with his implementation, however, was that the second level menu uses multiple data sources. The Master Page handles the top-level menu, but each page contains a reference to the specific datasource used to populate the sub-menu. As a result, if you decide to add a page, you need to manually add to that page some code to define what sub-menu should show up, which is cumbersome.

The ideal solution for a lazy developer like me would be to have all the menus handled in the Master Page, so that when you add a new page to your website, you just need to add it to the Sitemap, and the right menu and sub-menu shows up.

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