Menu Control Enhancement in ASP.NET 4.0

Introduction

The asp.net 3.5 asp.net menu control or old version was rendered through table. And we all know that it is very hard to have CSS applied to table. For a professional look of our website a CSS is must required thing. But in asp.net 4.0 Menu control is table less it will loaded with UL and LI tags which is easier to manage through CSS. Another problem with table is it will create a large html which will increase your asp.net page KB and decrease your performance. While with UL and LI Tags its very easy very short. So You page KB Size will also be down.

Let’s take a simple example. Let’s Create a menu control in asp.net with four menu item like following.

<asp:Menu ID="myCustomMenu"  runat="server" >
 <Items>
     <asp:MenuItem Text="Menu1" Value="Menu1"></asp:MenuItem>
     <asp:MenuItem Text="Menu2" Value="Menu2"></asp:MenuItem>
     <asp:MenuItem Text="Menu3" Value="Menu3"></asp:MenuItem>
     <asp:MenuItem Text="Menu4" Value="Menu4"></asp:MenuItem>
 </Items>
</asp:Menu>

It will render menu in browser like following.

Now If we render this menu control with tables then HTML as you can see via view page source like following.

Now If in asp.net 4.0 It will be loaded with UL and LI tags and if you now see page source then it will look like following. Which will have must lesser HTML then it was earlier like following.

So isn’t that great performance enhancement?. It’s very cool. If you still like old way doing with tables then in asp.net 4.0 there is property called ‘RenderingMode’ is given. So you can set RenderingMode=Table then it will load menu control with table otherwise it will load menu control with UL and LI Tags.Happy programming.