Let me give you a little background first:
I have some experience with Visual Basic, and quite a bit more experience with HTML/XML/ASP, but I've not really done much with .NET mostly because everything I've needed to do worked just fine without .NET. :) Now that I've ignored .NET for the last several years of course I have a need for it, specifically an application I'm developing right now would be a perfect candidate for an AJAX solution. So I feel like I'm starting from scratch just trying to catch up with the rest of the web development world. I have Visual Studio 2008 and a web server and I know just enough to be dangerous!
So here's my question:
I've been a firm believer in separating content, code, and design. In my past projects, most of my code was kept in include files, design in stylesheets, and HTML was for the content. Now that I'm learning Visual Studio 2008 (coming from a Visual InterDev background), I'm really confused about the use of master pages and/or stylesheets. Most of the books and online tutorials usually start off with "Add a table to the master page...". To me that seems like I'm going backwords. What are the best practices for design using VS2008 and .NET? Is CSS not a good idea to use with master pages? Or should I forgo the master pages and keep designing the way I have for years with CSS and just replace my old asp coding skills with .net?
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