Support for Nested Master Pages in VS2008

Fri, October 26, 2007, 08:34 AM under Orcas | VisualStudio
As cool as master pages were when introduced with VS2005/ ASP.NET 2.0, the designer was not capable of rendering nested master pages and I imagine that for some that hindered their ability to make the most of this cool feature. In VS2008, the new HTML designer that is shared with Expression Web supports nested master pages. Read all about this on ScottGu's blog post.

The key is that when you bring up the Add a New Item dialog and select a master page template, it will allow you to check the box that offers the option to base it on an existing master page. See this screenshot.

With earlier drops of Visual Studio, the above only applies when you create a new Web Site. It doesn't apply when you create a new ASP.NET Web Application project, i.e. there is no check box there. See this screenshot.

I strongly suspect that when VS2008 is released, we will have also added a new item template for the latter case... maybe something called Nested Master Page ;-)