figure 14. Calendar with the Smoke and Glass theme
a skin is a set of properties and templates that can be used to standardize the size, font, and other characteristics of controls on a page. You can use skins to create pre-defined display settings for a control and apply the appropriate skin at run time. You might, for example, select a skin based on a user preference, or determine the appropriate skin based on the browser used to access the page. Optional skins can be applied to pre-defined controls by setting the skinid property
<!- Default Skin -->!><asp: label runat="server" Font-names="verdana, arial" font-size="10pt" ForeColor= "#000066" BackColor="transparent"/><!- Title Skin -->!><asp: label runat="server" id="foo" skinid="Title" Font-names="verdana, arial" font size="18pt" ForeColor= "#000066" BackColor="transparent" font-bold="true" font-underline="true"/>
once a skin has been defined, you can apply it to all the controls on a page or to a specific control using themes and the skinid property built into all skinable controls.
if a default skin exists and the page is defined by a theme, the default skin will automatically be applied to a control. If you define the skinid property for the control, the default skin will be replaced by the skin referenced in the skinid property. This property can be configured during development or at run time (with a page refresh).
one of the major drawbacks of ASP development is that user management schemes must be created from scratch. This process is not only complex, but time consuming. The membership provider and login controls in ASP.NET 2.0 provide a unified way of managing user information.
any time a user logs into your application, you can automatically reference their identity as well as basic user information. The user''s credentials are securely stored in a backend user database that you can configure in the Web.config file. ASP.NET 2.0 provides both Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server providers, but you can create custom providers for any type of backend data store. This extensibility is extremely helpful if you already have an account database that you want to use with the membership feature in ASP.NET. After you configure membership for your application, you can use Login Controls in ASP.NET 2.0 to automate user registration and password retrieval.
asp.net 2.0 offers new login controls to help create and manage user accounts without writing any code. You can simply drag a <asp:createuserwizard> control onto a page to create a user registration form that offers a step-by-step wizard to walk users through the registration process.
the new login controls provide an intuitive interface that allows you to format
