A few people have asked me recently if there is a templating approach that works well for ASP.NET 1.x applications, since we have to wait until version 2.0 for MasterPages. Sure, I say, Master Pages.

Ha, and then I wait for the clarification they were talking about 1.x, and reply, so am I. The beauty of .NET is being able to create such powerful mechanisms or approaches before they are even a ‘standard’ tool used by a majority of developers. And that’s just what Paul Wilson did in this example of how to use Master Pages in ASP.NET 1.x. I believe this was Paul’s second go-round at Master Pages, improving upon his first version, which was based partially on the ASP.NET team’s reference implementation from awhile back. Back then Master Pages were mainly an experiment as far as I know, but now I can’t wait for them to become a standard tool everyone uses.

I’ve used Paul’s approach from this article at a few client now, and it’s worked extremely well. You won’t get quite the built-in designer (or WYSIWYG) support of 2.0’s version, but it’s more than adequate. Plus you’ll have a head-start on 2.0!