This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Joe Walnes. Original Post: ASP.NET MasterPages and SiteMesh Feed Title: Joe's New Jelly Feed URL: http://joe.truemesh.com/blog/index.rdf Feed Description: The musings of a ThoughtWorker obsessed with Agile, XP, maintainability, Java, .NET, Ruby and OpenSource. Mmm'kay? Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Joe Walnes Latest Posts From Joe's New Jelly

It's nice to see the SiteMesh approach catching on... ASP.NET 2.0 includes a features called MasterPages, which is a kind of hybrid of SiteMesh and Tiles .

Specifying a master page with ASP.NET is similar to how you do with SiteMesh - a plain HTML page containing common look and feel, with placeholders for the actual content. However with master pages, you need to change the actual pages serving the content to map fragments of content back to the place holders in the master page. This adds yet more noise to typically already noisy ASP.NET pages - a minor downer.

Overall, it's looking pretty promising. A nice bonus is how the page designer in VS.NET will render your master page when editing content pages, but grey it out. Look.

Anyhoo... I'll be demonstrating SiteMesh.NET and talking about MasterPages at the Bangalore .NET User Group tomorrow (Thursday) night. If you're in the area, please drop on by.