Themes in Whidbey...Is it worth it????

Sachin Nayak -

Theme management, how were u doing it previously??? I was using simple css files. I define classes for objects, or ids. Go ahead and just mention the styles for these classes in the CSS file. Ok, I want to change the theme??? I change the CSS style sheet. Was happy with the way things were going on. Then came along Whidbey. They even had a simple to use theme management, ok thats what they said.
I rushed forward, got to learn how to use it, and went ahead and implemented it. Wow, I can change themes, on the fly, by just changing the property. Finally, some really cool way of doing this. Great they will be generating a css file automatically. Cool!!!! Something in me decided i need to have a look as to how this css file.
So went ahead and executed the page. Good old IE started up, the goody good looking page opened up, and I did a view source.
Searched for keyword

  • <link,....no matches found
  • stylesheet...no matches

Wow, then how is it done??? I go to one of the text box. Wait a minute, i never put style property for this text box, or maybe i had.......Hey, I am sure I did not mention style for this one and this one. Oh God, all my text boxes have the same style..meaning THE SERVER IS INSERTING STYLE FOR EACH AND EVERY CONTROL I AM DEFINING SKIN FOR, and that means....if i use 10 text boxes, it will put the same style for all text boxes!!! Further, it is doing it at server side, meaning performace degradation. I have been a major performance freak, and this, nope i wont talk about what this feels like. Imagine 10 such controls on your page, 100 users accessing this page. All at the same time, with different themes. I wonder how the performance is. Lets see. I used ACT, simulated 100 users for 5 minutes with 10 second warm up using 2 pages

  • one with 10 textbox page with css
  • another 10 text box page with theming concepts of Whidbey

Compared the time to first bytes.

Second page gives 196.56ms

First page gives 33.09ms

So I guess you know what I will be using throughout my life, good old CSS.

Anyway have lots of other things to do.

Until the next blog....