ASP.NET Master Page in separate assembly - asp.net

I have some ASP.NET Master Pages located in one assembly. I need to use these Master Pages with my WebForm pages located in other assemblies that have a reference to the first assembly. I cannot seem to figure out a way to do this.
Is there a nice way that I can do this?
If no pretty solution exists I would also like to hear about possible hacks?

Master Pages are based upon Usercontrols, therefore they cannot be shared across applications.
That said, Dan Wahlin has a way around that particular limitation listed on his blog.

Sharing Master Pages Across IIS Applications by Dan Wahlin will give you some ideas..
Also, check this excellent article by Scott Allen. You can check the last section at the end on sharing master pages.

There are no pretty solutions to this problem.
What you can do is put it into a separate web application project and pre-compile it. Then take the precompiled dlls and ILMerge them into a single dll that you can reference in your app.
The actual master page that you reference will have a class name like this: MyMasterPage_aweknk so look it up in reflector. The class that looks like "MyMasterPage" is really just the code-behind.
It's really disgusting, but it's what we've done to reuse user controls in multiple applications.

Related

Aspx master page in MVC application

I know this is an old topic but i was wondering if a newer more elegant solution exists now. I am currently working with a legacy asp.net application and we are adding an MVC project to it. In order to keep uniformity we have been tasked with using the existing aspx master pages in our new project. This Article poses a viable solution. Has anyone found a newer, elegant, or more efficient way of achieving this goal?
I don't think there are new ways to integrate master pages.
Good approach is to have master page and _layout file that share most of the actual content via partial views/user controls as covered in Mixing Razor Views in WebForms.
Looked and looked and honestly could not find any one thing that would allow me to keep the look and functionality of my master page with links and functionality. We have decided to use ASPX pages with iframes that point to MVC pages. Eventually the point will be to eliminate the use of aspx master pages. Thanks everyone for great responses.

How to find and remove unused .aspx files in Website project

Recently I've been working on a big ASP.NET Web Forms site and it has some pages that apparently are not in use anymore, but no one knows for sure (this is an inherited project). Is there a way to know if those .aspx files/pages are being used or referenced?
This is not a Web Application Project but a Web Site Project; so I guess it's more difficult to find what .aspx pages are being used and which ones are not. if anyone has experienced something like this, what was your approach to clean this up?
No, probably not. What would be the criteria for that, if no one knows for sure? If you developers can't tell, how would some automatic system decide this for you? You don't need to have .aspx referenced in code for them to be used.
You can use search function in VS to find references inside the project, but in a big website like yours it might be kinda slow and problematic. I'm afraid you'll have to go page by page and figure it out by yourself.

site.Master file does not esist

Probably a silly question, being new to development, I am following tutorials and find references to a site.Master file in many of the tutorials I have come across. Is this something that is autogenerated or must I create this file myself? I have access to vs2010 and 2012 and I don't see a site.Master file in any of my projects that i have started. There is however a _layout.cshtml file. I only ask as in every tutorial that mentions this file, doe not mention creating it, just that the file exists.
Here is the deal.
You are probably reading tutorials about MVC or MVC 2 where the view engine is aspx and master pages still are used as a template.
Since MVC 3 a new engine is introduced: Razor. Also this _Layout.cshtml page takes the role of Site.master (master page). With Visual Studio 2010/2012 if you select an MVC project it defaults to Razor syntax and includes _Layout.cshtml as a Shared View.
You can still follow these 'old' tutorials, but mind this difference and act accordingly when recreating the steps.
It could be auto generated if the template you created your project from included a master file. Look in the Solution Explorer (If the solution Explorer isn't visible, hit View -> Solution Explorer) and see if you have a file in your site that ends in the extension ".Master". If not, right click your project in the Solution Explorer then click Add New Item. On the left select your language (Visual Basic or C#) then in the right select Master Page. Give it a name at the bottom such as site.Master. Then click Add. You'll have a master page.
After that, you'll probably want to hook up your other pages to use the new master page. But I'll leave that to your tutorials.
ASP.NET Master Pages: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wtxbf3hh.ASPX
site.master files are usually auto-generated for you when you make a new default ASP.NET website in Visual Studio. Depending on where are in your project, you may need to create one yourself, if Master Pages is the route you want to take. They aren't mandatory, they just make things easier IMO.
MVC has no concept of a masterpage, and site.Master doesn't exist. If you find a reference to site.Master on a tutorial you are using 'regular' ASP.NET (or, as I like to call it, if I'm trying to be polite 'old-fashioned' ASP.NET), not ASP.NET MVC
Yes , It is auto-generated when you create a new ASP Website Project in VS

Using master pages with multiple entities

I'm beginning to plan a complete redesign of our departments intranet pages. As it stands, every department gets their own folder within root. They all share the same look and feel but don't use CSS everything in each file is straight up static text. Basically, if a change has to be made to the header, every file must get changed. The number of files is somewhere in the hundreds. Since we're in the process of getting a new look & feel, I figured this would be the appropriate time to redesign the structure as a whole as well. My idea was to create a new C# Web Project to utilize the C# Master Pages. Within that project, each page would use the master page. Since I know they like to make many minor cosmetic changes, master pages would make things much simpler and quite frankly, I don't have time to manually edit a header 564 (random) times. The other aspect of this site is that the root would contain a documents folder within sub folders pertaining to each fo our departments.
Guess my question is, has anyone tackled an issue like this and could shed some light as to how they fixed it.
Also, would it be worth upgrading IIS and .NET to their latest version?
If you are already working in .NET 2.0, then you shouldn't need to do any upgrades, and there won't be any additional infrastructure cost.
I would highly recommend using Master pages, as they do make it painless to have a common look and feel for your entire site.
Another cool feature of Master pages is that you can nest them together. This would let you have a common feel between all pages. And then each department would have it's own Master page nested into your top-level page.
I'll start with the cost question. You need to be using ASP.NET 2.0 or higher to take advantage of master pages. Technically the .NET framework is free, however Visual Studio is not. Visual Web Developer is free, but the license might be for non-commercial projects only. I'm not sure. IIS is also free, Windows Server 2008 is not. You are fine running on XP or Server 2000/2003. There isn't really any reason to upgrade.
I can't say that I have tackled a problem exactly like yours, but it sounds like what you need is a content management system. Some examples are the cuyahoga project, or Umbraco. These systems allow you to create a general look and feel, and store all content in a database or xml files and provide an online content editor, so the content of the pages can be managed by people that don't necessarily know HTML or Programming.
You can have a master-page hierarchy:
Master page for everyone
Master page for department A
Master page for department B
Whatever's common for everyone you set in the first master page.
Then you make a master page for department A pages - this master page's master page is the first one.

How to consolidate ASP.NET master pages across applications?

First shot at throwing a question on these boards so hopefully I can get some help, here goes:
I am working to start up the .NET practice at my client. We have 5 small scale .NET applications in place currently with a few them of them live into production. They're mostly small reporting pieces with some data entry/business logic functionality. Each of these applications is currently using the identical master pages.
What I mean is that there is a copy of the same master page in each application. They are all basic website->WCF->BL->DB tiered applications. So I have 4 copies of the same master page that I have to change when I make a change to it.
The client DOES NOT want to consolidate all of these into a single solution. They like the separation of applications across sites. I just don't want to continue dealing with the hassle of multiple updates for common elements (which there will be many more of across these applications).
The code is all stored in team foundation server. We also do NOT want to compile the master page into a .dll and deploy it.
Can anyone please make some suggestions as to how I can maintain a single copy of these common files (master, .css, etc) across my multiple applications.
thanks in advance
You might want to look at Sharing Master Pages in Visual Studio.
If that is no help then you could try using Build Events in Visual Studio. I would pick one of the projects to be my "Main Project" and only edit the master page from that project. When you build the project it would run a command that would copy that master page(if it had changed) to your set locations.
The client DOES NOT want to
consolidate all of these into a single
solution. They like the separation of
applications across sites. I just dont
want to continue dealing with the
hassle of multiple updates for common
elements (which there will be many
more of across these applications).
The code is all stored in team
foundation server. We also do NOT want
to compile the master page into a dll
and deploy it.
You eliminated the only two real options there. What all is in the master page? Would it be possible to extract the HTML UI elements to a single template or series of template HTML files and import those dynamically into the master page? You could then relocate the common HTML to an arbitrary URL and have the master page for each application pull it in dynamically.
Edit: I lied. You could also use a VirtualPathProvider like Sharepoint does to store the master page in a database or some other directory, but beware that VirtualPathProviders do not work in MediumTrust environments.
See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.hosting.virtualpathprovider.aspx
If you are using Web Applications (compiled into a dll) rather than Web Sites you can do the following:
Right click on the folder you want to store the master page in
Select "Add Existing Item..."
Browse to the master page on the file system, and select both the .master and the .master.cs files.
Then, rather than clicking on the "Add" button, click on the little down arrow to the right of Add, this will bring up a little menu with the options: "Add" and "Add As Link"
Select "Add As Link" this will reference the file in your project, while leaving it in the original location in your dev environment - this allows you to edit it in either application, while keeping it up to date in the other applications.
Obviously if you edit the code behind, you'll need to re-compile the other projects before you deploy the changes to those sites.
This isn't available in web site projects as they rely on the file structure to work out what is in the project.
EDIT: Missed the css part. Obviously you won't be able to serve those files, so this should only work for the master page.
Don't know your scenario, so
IF you can control the DNS / virtual directories to the applications you could use a format like this:
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application1
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application2
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application3
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application4
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application5
and have your Master page at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master,
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master.cs,
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master.cs.designer
Then you could reference the single copy of the master page from /../master.Master. I gave this a quick shot with a precompiled master page to make sure I could reach back beyond my root. You might have to give it a shot to see.
We use our source control to create links to the shared files in all the places that we need it. So if you edit in one place, you just need to do a get latest and it will appear in the other places you have linked it.
I ended up going with the VPP route. I created a virtual path provider and built my master page into a DLL and this is working. Now I have a massive problem though in that a Content page whos master page is late bound through the codebehind throws validation/formatting hissy fits because it thinks its should be a stand along page. my CNTRL + K, CNTRL + D has broken on every page where I'm now sharing my master page. This is extremely frustring for me and the team

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