Hi Buz,

It would be better, first of all, to post this question to the
microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet newsgroup, as that is a newsgroup
for questions about writing ASP.Net applications, while this one is a
newsgroup for asking questions about Visual Studio. I can certainly
understand why you posted this here, thinking that you could configure
Visual Studio to not close your tags for you. However, as I will illustrate,
you're barking up the wrong tree there. And you would get more answers from
the other newsgroup.

Still, I can answer your question, and I will.

ASP.Net is designed with a certain object model, which, in order to be as
successful and productive with it as possible, should be (and certainly CAN
be) followed. You have a requirement, which is a fairly common one. In fact,
ASP.Net 2.0 introduces Master Pages to make this sort of thing simpler. But
it certainly CAN be done in ASP.Net 1.1 without having to break the object
model.

The object model is object-oriented, and ASP.Net Controls correspond to HTML
client-side objects. Therefore, it is bad form (and practice) to attempt to
solve this issue by breaking an HTML object in half. Instead, the ASP.Net
object model is similar to the HTML object model in that, as HTML objects
(tags) can enclose and host other HTML objects, so ASP.Net Controls can host
(and enclose) other ASP.Net Controls as well.

So, what you're describing is a "container" for other Controls (and HTML
objects) that will comprise the top, and possibly the bottom and one or more
sides, of all (or most) of your pages. The simplest solution for you would
be to create a User Control, which is a templated control, to host your
other controls and HTML in. Like System.Web.UI.Page, a User Control has an
HTML/Server-side Template, containing both HTML tags, and Server Control
tags. It also has a CodeBehind class that has all of the server-side
functionality, properties, and fields for that Control.

You can easily put other HTML and ASP.Net Controls inside a UserControl,
including other UserControls. If you want design-time support, you can
create a custom Designer class that will enable you to see how the Control
will look when rendered at design time, and even support dragging and
dropping other Controls into it, as well as HTML. This might be a bit too
much trouble for you, though, and it can be avoided by hosting other
UserControls inside the first, and adding them programmatically at run-time.
that way you can simply work with the User Control that makes up the Page
content for that particular Page in the Designer.