Introduction to ASP.NET Menu and Sitemap

ASP.NET Menu Control

The ASP.NET Menu control allows you to develop both statically and dynamically displayed menus for your ASP.NET Web pages. You can configure the contents of the Menu control directly in the control, or you can specify the contents by binding the control to a data source.
Without writing any code, you can control the appearance, orientation, and content of an ASP.NET Menu control. In addition to the visual properties exposed by the control, the control supports ASP.NET control skins and themes.

ASP.NET SiteMapPath

The SiteMapPath displays a navigation path (which is also known as a breadcrumb or eyebrow) that shows the user the current page location and displays links as a path back to the home page. The control provides many options for customizing the appearance of the links.

The SiteMapPath control obtains navigation data from a site map. This data includes information about the pages in your Web site, such as the URL, title, description, and location in the navigation hierarchy. Storing your navigation data in one place makes it easier to add and remove items in the navigational menus of your Web site.

In earlier versions of ASP and ASP.NET, when you added a page to your Web site and then added a link to that new page from every other page in the Web site, you had to add the links manually, include a common file, or develop custom navigation functionality. ASP.NET version 2.0 includes navigation controls that make navigational menus easy to create, customize, and maintain.