With the new VSeWSS tools for Visual Studio 2005, SharePoint developers can now create site definitions and deploy them as easy as 1-2-3 to the server without any copy and paste steps involved. Well, it is still in CTP and there are some serious bugs there, so we cannot expect it to work 100%. One thing that is strange is the fact the there is no direct way to have a custom master page in yor project. As soon as you change MasterPageFile="~masterurl/default.master" to anything else , you will get dozens of errors and warnings and project does not get compiled.
If you follow Todd's solution on how to create ghosted and unghosted master pages , you still have no chance to get this working.I changed Todd's solution and finally managed to add my own custom.master to the project. here are the steps:
1) Add a custom.master to the project (same-level as default.aspx)
In ONET.XML
2)Add the following tag inside the tag.
3)Scroll down to the section and change it to
4) Inside the configuration Tag above , go to the section
and add:
It should look like this after you change it:
....
.....
5) Create a new Module section under the tag as shown below:
6) Build and deploy the project , custom.master should show up in the master page gallery of your site and custom.master page is in effect.