All my birthdays have come at once

Yes, today is my birthday.  How old am I?  Well, my 5 year old says I must be at least 28!  He’s a good lad – I’ll keep him.

Funnily enough, my wife has been sick this week so I’ve been working from home until yesterday, and tomorrow I’m taking a day off for other reasons.  So my birthday present is to spend a day at work!!  Not sure how to take that, really…

Dynamic CSS

Recently, while working on a new ASP.NET MVC website for Glenmore Park Anglican Church, I have found myself wishing for the same server-side text substitution in CSS files that we enjoy in ASPX files (the <%= … %> construct).

It seems that this is much easier to accomplish that it may appear at first.

Create an ASP.NET page (say, site.aspx), and below the Page specification, include your CSS tags.

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="site.aspx.cs" Inherits="Content.CSS.site" %>
body {
    margin: 0px;
    font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
    background-color: #666666;
    background-image: url(<%= AppHelper.ImageUrl("MyImage.png") %>);
}

Now comes the tricky bit.  In the code-behind file, include the following:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.ContentType = "text/css";
}

Now just use site.aspx rather than site.css in your CSS links, and voila!

The “Mojave Experiment”

Couldn’t resist.

This is fantastic!!