Introducing ASP 2.0 Master Pages
While meeting with the development staff of a local company we began discussing a project that the CIO had assigned them earlier that morning. The project was actually the first in a series of about 15 planned Web sites scheduled over the next year. Each site was designed to expose sales and marketing collateral to their international reseller community. Their lead developer explained that the first site would contain about a hundred pages, but when complete they expected each site to have several thousand distinct pages. He said, "Layout control and reusability are key for this project to have any chance of success." In their hasty research that morning they had run across a new feature of Visual Studio 2005 called master pages. It seemed to them that this feature might be an important key to this project. However, they hadn't been able to completely understand how it could be used. In this article, as I did that afternoon, we will cover how master pages provide a flexible, template-based architecture for building Web-based applications using Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. <Read More>
