ASP.Net Masterpages in Expression Web
Expression Web supports ASP.Net Masterpages, with two issues in
Version 1, one negative, one positive.
First the negative
When you create a Masterpage it has two ContentPlaceholders by default, the
Content placeholder (normally id= 'ContentPlaceHolder1') and the Head
placeholder (normally id='Head').
However when you create a page from the masterpage and work with it in either
design or code view, only the main ContentPlaceHolder is visible. The result of
this is that you can't alter the page properties (right-click 'Page Properties')
and change the page description or keyword entries.
The only way I've found to get the Head contentplaceholder to show is to
alter something that results in a page style being created. For example
highlight some text and click the right-indent icon on the formatting tool bar.
If you then left-indent it to undo this action (note left-indent, not the undo
function) this will have exposed the head ContentPlaceHolder. You can now edit
the page properties, add additional meta tags, script etc in this head section.
Now the positive
Unlike VS2005 or VS2008 Beta 2 (formerly Orcas), Expression Web lets you put
default content into ContentPlaceHolders on the masterpage. (In a similar way as
you might do with DWTs).
Once you've used this it's annoying to find that it's not supported in VS2008
which uses a version of Expression Web as its Visual Web Developer design
surface.
I would imagine this will be removed in future versions of Expression Web!