Themes in Whidbey...Is it worth it????

Theme management, how were u doing it previously??? I was using simple css files. I define classes for objects, or ids. Go ahead and just mention the styles for these classes in the CSS file. Ok, I want to change the theme??? I change the CSS style sheet. Was happy with the way things were going on. Then came along Whidbey. They even had a simple to use theme management, ok thats what they said.
I rushed forward, got to learn how to use it, and went ahead and implemented it. Wow, I can change themes, on the fly, by just changing the property. Finally, some really cool way of doing this. Great they will be generating a css file automatically. Cool!!!! Something in me decided i need to have a look as to how this css file.
So went ahead and executed the page. Good old IE started up, the goody good looking page opened up, and I did a view source.
Searched for keyword

• <link,....no matches found
• stylesheet...no matches

Wow, then how is it done??? I go to one of the text box. Wait a minute, i never put style property for this text box, or maybe i had.......Hey, I am sure I did not mention style for this one and this one. Oh God, all my text boxes have the same style..meaning THE SERVER IS INSERTING STYLE FOR EACH AND EVERY CONTROL I AM DEFINING SKIN FOR, and that means....if i use 10 text boxes, it will put the same style for all text boxes!!! Further, it is doing it at server side, meaning performace degradation. I have been a major performance freak, and this, nope i wont talk about what this feels like. Imagine 10 such controls on your page, 100 users accessing this page. All at the same time, with different themes. I wonder how the performance is. Lets see. I used ACT, simulated 100 users for 5 minutes with 10 second warm up using 2 pages

one with 10 textbox page with css

another 10 text box page with theming concepts of Whidbey

Compared the time to first bytes.

Second page gives 196.56ms

First page gives 33.09ms

So I guess you know what I will be using throughout my life, good old CSS.

Anyway have lots of other things to do.

Until the next blog....