Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

3.3. Working with CSS in Visual Web Developer

VWD has a number of handy tools on board for working with CSS. Most of them are new in the 2008 release of VWD, as good CSS support was one of the design goals of this latest release. The following tools are at your disposal:

• The Style Sheet toolbar, giving you quick access to creating new rules and styles.

• The CSS Properties Grid, which enables you to change property values.

• The Manage Styles window, enabling you to organize styles in your site, changing them from embedded to external style sheets and vice versa, reorder them, link existing style sheets to a document, and create new inline, embedded, or external style sheets.

• The Apply Styles window, which you can use to choose from all available styles in your site and quickly apply them to different elements in your page.

• The Style Builder, which you can use to visually create declarations.

• The Add Style Rule window, which helps in building more complex selectors.

Although you've already seen some of these tools in this chapter, the next sections give you a detailed look at the functionality they offer. You'll see how to carry out tasks, like creating new styles, modifying existing ones, and applying styles to existing elements. During the explanation, you get a good look at the tools mentioned here.

3.3.1. Creating New Styles in External Style Sheets

In an earlier Try It Out, you manually added selectors to the CSS file and then used the Style Builder to write the rules. However, you ...