Use masterpages in Web Sites and Web Application Projects
Since Visual Studio SP1, you have the option to choose between 2 approaches when building websites
- ASP.NET Web Site
- ASP.NET Web Application
The ASP.NET Web Application has been added in SP1 (actually you could download it seperately already before SP1)
There are some differences between both, basically the Web Application gives us back a project file like we had in Visual Studio 2003.
Initially Microsoft dropped the project files for ASP.NET in Visual Studio 2005 in favour for a location based approach (file system, IIS, ...). However because of too many complaints of the community, Microsoft undo its mistake and released the WAP (Web Application Project) and so restored the project files for ASP.NET, later on this was packaged into Visual Studio SP1.
My recomendation is to always use Web Application Projects which you can create using:
- File | New | Project menu
- Select the "Web" category in Visual C# or Visual Basic
Master Pages
Now the goal of this article is to point out the differences when working with master pages.
ASP.NET Web Site
In the last years you've probably worked with ASP.NET Web Sites. When you added a new Web Form you had the option to select if you wanted to use a Master Page or not like in the picture below
ASP.NET Web Application
If you now create a ASP.NET Web Application, you'll notice that the option is gone. Instead, there's a new item template called "Web Content Form".
