SharePoint 2010: Starter Master Page Error – File cannot be found

UPDATE:
As much as I was hoping this problem would be resolved with the new version of SharePoint Designer…it’s not.  It’s more of an example of Designer doing me a favor I didn’t ask for than a real bug.  Fortunatly it’s a really easy fix provided you recognize the problem right away.  With a simple change in the way you create master pages you can avoid the issue altogether.

It seams that if you create your file by creating a blank master page in SharePoint Designer and then open the Starter page in Designer and copy the content from the start to the blank master, SharePoint Designer adjusts the path in these three lines removing the ~/.  This can be easily avoided by opening your starter page in notepad and copying from notepad to SharePoint Designer.  Of course, the other options is to just add the ~/ back on to the front of each file path and save.

You can find this issue fully document on Heather Solomon’s blog.  Look at item number 7 in her FAQ!

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Randy Drisgill (SharePoint MVP) has been working his butt off blogging about SharePoint 2010 branding for a some time now and if you have had occasion to google the subject you will quickly realize he is the only guy out there right now.  Randy has produced two starter master pages for SharePoint 2010 branding that allow you to start your project from a standard and well commented base.

I used one of his templates this week and ran into an error that was very familiar to me from MOSS 2007 and thought I would share it here to help others avoid the problem.  If you used any of the base templates for MOSS 2007 created by Heather Solomon you are probably familiar with the issue and NO, it has not gone away in 2010.

After loading up your starter master page and selecting it in your text site you get a “File cannot be found error”. Pictured below.

First, take a look at your master page in design mode (SharePoint Designer 2010 beta), you may see other errors flagged there but the focus of your attention should be on the header of your master page.  Look for these three lines of code in the header:

Change the path in all three lines to the following:

This fixed the problem for me.  In addition, I had an issue with the following section of code in Randy’s Starter Page:

  

Specifically,  line 365 and the two references to   were causing some sort of problem that went away after I removed them.  Other than these two items my experience with the starter pages has been great.  They are well commented and stripped down to just the things you need to get started.

You can find Randy’s starter pages on CodePlex.