Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WSS 3.0 and Custom Master Page Problem
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 thesection and change it to
4) Inside the configuration Tag above , go to thesection
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.