To make it easier for users to get to a section of our site, we created a virtual directory alias which redirects the user to a specific web page. If there's no virtual directory for http://www.mysite.com/subdirectory/webpage.aspx, then that Master Page reference works fine. But once I created a virtual directory and attempted to get to that same page by typing the path to the virtual directory (http://www.mysite.com/subdirectory), I received this error message relating to the web page trying to access our site's Master Page, which is located in the root of the site:

Server Error in '/subdirectory' Application.
Parser Error
Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: The file '/subdirectory/MasterPage.master' does not exist.

Source Error:

Line 1: <%@ Page Language="VB" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPage.master" AutoEventWireup="false" EnableSessionState="true" EnableViewState="false" Title="Web Page" %>

Source File: /subdirectory/webpage.aspx Line: 1

I've tried changing the "~/MasterPage.master" reference to "./MasterPage.master" (one period), "../MasterPage.master" (two periods), "/MasterPage.master" (no tilde before slash), and "MasterPage.master" (just the file name) to no avail! Does anyone here know how I can fix this?

These are two sites that contain steps on what we did:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro....mspx?mfr=true (under "Virtual Directories")
http://www.beansoftware.com/ASP.NET-...S-ASP.NET.aspx (under "How to create the virtual directory on the web server")

Hi,

while you can probably reach master pages outside of the virtual directory with "../MasterPage.master" by setting the AspEnableParentPaths metabase property to true (or creating a child virtual directory that points to your root), it is not really recommended.
I'm afraid that if you go down the path of a virtual directory it's best to duplicate your master pages.