This might sound like an odd question, but when does a Page object actually

come into existence?  Let me explain a little bit of the background

information for you.  From my understanding, currently your code-behinds for

your pages inherit from System.Web.UI.Page as do your User

Controls(Pagelets).  However one of the planned breaking changes is that

User Controls will inherit from System.Web.UI.Control, which interestingly

enough is what Page inherits from right now.  Combine this with a desire to

make certain enhancements to the Page class, I've created two classes for my

personal use: MyPage, which inherits from System.Web.UI.Page and

MyUserControl which also inherits from Page.  I have also learned that User

Controls cannot talk to each other directly, however they can communicate

with the Page they are on, and the Page can communicate with them.  So

inside MyUserControl I've overwritten the Parent property of Page to return

me a reference to the page that I currently am on, which looks like this.



public new MyPage Parent

	{

	get

		{

		Control control = null;

		try

			{

			control = base.Parent;

			Trace.Write( control.ToString(), "Try

base.Parent.ToString();" );

			}

		catch( Exception e )

			{

			Trace.Write( e.ToString(), "Catch Exceptions to

control = base.Parent" );

			}

		while ( ! ( control is Page ) )

			{

			try

				{

				control = control.Parent;

				Trace.Write( control.ToString(),

"control.Parent.ToString()" );

				}

			catch( Exception e )

				{

				Trace.Write( e.ToString(), "Catch Exceptions

to control = control.Parent" );

				break;

				}

			}

			return ( MyPage )control;

		}

	}



Now I have had this working for a while, the most notable example is a Menu

User Control that displays the Navigation system for the site, by accepting

values from other controls hosted on the page.  However, recently I have

decided that in an effort to reduce the amount of copying HTML, and to have

a single code-base for all html, I would break up each page even more, to

have controls host the major pieces of the 'static' HTML bits.  This is

where I'm starting to have problems.



I've created a PageStart User Control, that is suppose to contain everything

from the <!DOCTYPE> tag down to the first opening <table> tag, taking

attributes such as title.



<MyControls:PageStart Title="Welcome Page" StyleSheet="MyStyle.css"

ScriptLibrary="MyScripts.js" DocID="DocumentID" runat="server" />



This control, which is the first on the page, cannot access a Parent of any

type, it returns a NullReferenceException.  Later controls however don't

have this problem.  It is critical that this control access the MyPage class

instance though, because I am actually using it to set some of those values

as Properties of the Page.  These errors lead me to believe that somewhere

in the opening HTML tags the Page Class is instantiated, and I think it's in

the body tag.  Can anyone confirm this, or does anyone know a way around the

problem.



Thanks for the help,

Aaron