Been studying my ASP.NET with a little more gusto lately, and ran across a fairly important article and an interesting new sort of URL.

If you're into ASP.NET and haven't quite gotten what Inherits vs. Src vs. CodeBehind means in the "@ Page directive", head on over to this article at dotnetjunkies. Somebody didn't bother with spellcheck (not that I do here in the blog, but come on! This is a site with commercials that benefit the author! :^D), but this article begins to clear up the differences with the three attributes. Didn't hold my hand enough to show me how to use compiled source from ASP.NET, but I think that's a google or two away.

The weird URL comes from the recommendation from the article that I actually look at the .NET documentation. Here's the link...

ms-help://MS.NETFrameworkSDK/cpgenref/html/cpconpage.htm

That's a little strange, eh? MS really is making a play for the net here, it seems. In aspx code created by VS.NET, you'll get things like body tags with MS_POSITIONING="GridLayout" meta tags with name="vs_targetSchema" content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5" in them. I think MS is going a little too far, and wouldn't be surprised to see ms-help:// turn into ms-http:// in the not too distant future.

I hope to finish up an article this weekend that talks about this MS branded html at devArticles.com soon -- specifically regarding the overly popular use of the .NET DataGrid to create html to display information from a database. Look under the under, people!

Anyhow, guess what happened when I clicked the ms-help:// link in the article while viewing in Mozilla? That's right, after a few seconds IE popped up outta nowhere with the content I wanted -- content that could very easily have been represented in plain jane html. It's starting again, folks.