Creating Master Pages with Visual Web Developer

If you don't understand Master Pages please read our tutorial 'Understanding Master Pages'. This tutorial will show you how to set up a website using Visual Web Developer (VWD) and create a Master Page for all the pages in the site. Fortunately VWD comes with it's own inbuilt web development server so you don't need Internet Information Services (IIS) to run your website application locally.

Let's first of all create our website. Open VWD, click on 'File' and Select 'New Web Site'.

Select 'ASP.NET Web Site' making sure 'File System' is selected and the language we'll use is 'Visual Basic'. Our Website is located at 'H:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Website1'. Click 'OK'.

Have a look in the 'Solution Explorer' to the right hand side and notice the default files that Visual Web Developer creates. If you can't see the 'Solution Explorer' then select 'View' and click 'Solution Explorer'. Don't worry too much about these files, we'll cover them in another tutorial.

Now that we have setup our website let's create our Master Page. Select 'File' and then 'New File'.

Make sure you select 'Master Page' from the dialogue box. As we are not using 'code-behind' files in this example leave the 'Place code in separate file' unchecked.

Creating Master Pages with Visual Web Developer Part 2 >>