Q. Where are Master Pages and Layout Pages located in a SharePoint site?

Ans. They are location in masterPage(Master Page Gallery) under _catalogs folder of root site.


Q. What will you use to make a web part zone invisible when its not containing any webpart?

Ans. You can set the id and the name attribute of the <td>tag containing the web part zone as _invisibleIfEmpty.
For e.g
<td id="_invisibleIfEmpty" name="_invisibleIfEmpty" valign="top">
WebPart zone....
</td>


Q. What is the Difference between Master Pages and Layout Pages in SharePoint.

Ans. Master pages and page layouts dictate the overall look and feel of your SharePoint site.

Differences are
1) Master pages contain controls that are shared across multiple page layouts,
such as navigation,search, or language-preference for multilingual sites.
Page layouts contain field controls and Web Parts.

2) Page layouts can be used by all page instances that are based on that
page layout.Master pages can be used by all page instances in a site.



Q. Can you explain me the Page Processing Model?

Ans. The following list gives a step-by-step breakdown of how ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 interact to render pages in a SharePoint site:

1) The browser requests a Web page from Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS).
2) IIS passes the request to ASP.NET 2.0.
3) An HttpApplication pipeline is created for the request.
4) ASP.NET 2.0 fetches the page via the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 3 file provider. ASP.NET passes the URL to the file provider, and the file provider fetches the page and returns the page stream. The Windows SharePoint Services file provider implements caching and reduces round-trips to the database.
5) ASP.NET loads a Page class, parses the page stream, and finds a reference to the page layout upon which the page is based.
6) The ASP.NET engine compiles the page stream and stores it in memory.
7) ASP.NET queries the Windows SharePoint Services file provider for the page layout.
8) ASP.NET loads the stream for the page layout associated with the current page.
9) ASP.NET compiles the page layout and stores it in memory. ASP.NET can free this memory later if the system needs memory.
10) ASP.NET determines the master page for the site and fetches the master page via the Windows SharePoint Services file provider.
11) ASP.NET compiles the master page and writes to the disk so you never have to recompile the master page unless you modify it.
12) The page layout runs each control on the page in the context of the page that was requested.
13) ASP.NET updates the necessary caches.
14) IIS returns the page to the browser.


Q. What are absolute and relative URL?

Ans. When a URL is absolute, it defines unambiguously where the object is located.
Relative Url is an abbreviated to a current location.