Jelle Druyts

Since ASP.NET 2.0 is making such an effort to reduce the need for writing actual code, it's now becoming less likely that you will be using code-behind files. It's still possible of course, but if you don't actually create a page class yourself, ASP.NET will just do that for you. And the good thing is, you can just specify the base class it needs to use - so you can slide in your own custom base class in stead of the standard System.Web.UI.Page. Very convenient in scenarios where you're writing framework-like base pages, or if you want to do something extra in every page of your site. Just use the <pages> section in the web.config file as such:

<pages pageBaseType="Acme.Framework.Web.UI.SharedBasePage">

You can do the same for controls by the way. Actually, you can do a whole lot of things in that tag, like adding namespaces that need to be imported by default, pre-registering tag prefixes, well basically just managing your pages in a single place. Cool!