title: How to consolidate ASP.NET master pages across applications?
body: <p>First shot at throwing a question on these boards so hopefully I can get some help, here goes:</p>
  
  <p>I am working to start up the .NET practice at my client. We have 5 small scale .NET applications in place currently with a few them of them live into production. They're mostly small reporting pieces with some data entry/business logic functionality. Each of these applications is currently using the identical master pages.</p>
  
  <p>What I mean is that there is a copy of the same master page in each application. They are all basic website->WCF->BL->DB tiered applications. So I have 4 copies of the same master page that I have to change when I make a change to it.</p>
  
  <p>The client DOES NOT want to consolidate all of these into a single solution. They like the separation of applications across sites. I just don't want to continue dealing with the hassle of multiple updates for common elements (which there will be many more of across these applications). </p>
  
  <p>The code is all stored in team foundation server. We also do NOT want to compile the master page into a .dll and deploy it.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone please make some suggestions as to how I can maintain a single copy of these common files (master, .css, etc) across my multiple applications.</p>
  
  <p>thanks in advance</p>