Working with Styles in Visual Studio .NET
The Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE) offers some powerful assistance with building style sheets and applying choice filters to these styles. So far, this chapter has demonstrated how you write style sheets using ASP.NET server control syntax. However, this entails working in the HTML view of your mobile Web Forms application and writing the XML text directly, which isn't the most effective use of the IDE. Throughout this section, we'll describe how you can use the tools in Visual Studio .NET to tackle the most common tasks associated with creating style sheets.
The Styles Editor
When you place a mobile StyleSheet control on a mobile Web Forms page, you can access a style editor in Design view that makes creating new styles straightforward. To access this editor, right-click the StyleSheet control and then click Edit Styles on the context menu to reveal the Styles Editor dialog box. Figure 8-8 shows how this editor looks.
Figure 8-8: The Styles Editor dialog box
The upper-left corner of this dialog box contains a Style Types list box. The list box shows all the available style types, of which there should be two: PagerStyle and Style. As you'll recall, we discussed these two styles earlier in this chapter. To create a new style, you must select the style type you want and then click the right arrow (>) button. A new entry will appear in the dialog box's Defined Styles list. This style has a default name, which is Style1 in the first instance. That's all it takes to successfully create a new style! Now you simply need to define its properties.To define the style properties, you must set the property values in the Properties window, found in the lower-right corner of the dialog box. As you set each property, the Sample view to the left of the Properties window updates, showing the visual appearance of the style. When you finish setting the style properties, simply click the OK button to complete the style definition.