Skinning : ASP.NET skins vs CSS

There's seems to be a little misunderstaning between ASP.NET developers on what to use for skinning : ASP.NET skins or CSS ? The answer is, of course, both. That's because each each of them is good at it's own thing. ASP.NET can be used to give the same look to server side controls while CSS is used for the rest of the design.

Here's a simple, yet very effective, tip for integrating these 2. Create a theme (let's call it "spring") and inside the folder create a CSS file with the same name as the theme (spring.css). Now if the theme is associated with the site pages (you can do that from we.config) the spring.css is applied automatically without referencing it from the master page.