Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Master Pages

A master page is a special page with .master extension, which provides a template containing a set of common elements for each page in the application. A master page typically contains elements such as headers, footers, and navigation elements so that you can implement one time a number of elements that each page can contain. Visual Studio provides a specific item template for creating a master page, but the simplest way for understanding how it works is examining a basic one. When you create a new project using the ASP.NET Web Application template, such as in the current example, the IDE adds a master page for you. As you can see Visual Studio implements by default a couple of links for navigating between pages, such as Home and ...