My Requirements For Templating in Whidbey

With the launch of ScrollingGrid only hours away, I'm working on upgrades to my website to allow for it to handle some new features we had planned when we had multiple products for sale. In doing so, I wanted to rearrange the site architecture, similarly to the way I rearranged my website graphics structure a few weeks ago. The problem with my current templating solution, as far as I can figure out, is that most of the control loading is based on physical file locations, not virtual locations. This means that I can't have a single skin directory that is virtually included in all my applications, so that template changes get propagated to http://www.interscapeusa.com, http://support.interscapeusa.com, http://demos.interscapeusa.com, https://secure.interscapeusa.com, etc. I could be wrong, and I have yet to really discuss the issue with Paul, but at this point, having screwed with it for several hours, I have the distinct feeling that the answer is no.

So, MS Whidbey Team, here's what you gotta do: I really hate the fact that you guys are adding, like, 5 new folders to which I cannot configure the location I want them to be. So, when using the Themes folder, please make sure that it can be a reference to a virtual folder, so that I can have several sites that use the same theme files.

Maybe this is a problem that can be addressed with WinFS in Longhorn?

2 Comments

  • why not just create a virtual directory on each one of those sites? that way you can still leverage a single location of controls, but to the app it will exist as a part of the application.

  • That's the point I was trying to make. I want to do that, but I can't because the templating system I'm using uses physical locations instead of virtual ones.

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