Essential ASP.NET for the Web Developer (Part 3 of 15): MasterPages, Themes, and Skins
Verdict: See It
Details: There's probably not an asp.net developer around that hasn't heard of MasterPages in 2.0.  What's nice is this webcast shows dealing with MasterPages in code, setting them programmatically, and getting strongly typed access to them through the MasterType directive on content pages.  The Themes and Skins half of the webcast was alright, Fritz does a good job of explaining what each piece is and how they relate to css stylesheets, resources, etc.

I've been somewhat concerned about the accuracy of the information in this series only because it was developed on a pre-release drop of the framework.  I decided I'd try out the MasterType directive just because it sounded pretty useful and it's not something I've heard of that much (if I did, it didn't stick).

Documentation exists for it, and the content page changed a MasterPage property as I had instructed.  What strikes me as weird those is VS.NET 2005 (or maybe the ReSharper 2.0 Beta) is giving me the red squiggle on the aspx and not giving me intellisense in the code beside file...  It's ReSharper that's causing the problem; I'd basically abandoned ReSharper 2.0 because it's been unusable and completely unstable for me.  I was hoping the beta meant they were getting ready for a real release, I'll have to go back and check out the EAP and see if there has been a more recent drop that doesn't cause as many problems.