For a long time my use of MasterPages has prevented the use of the VS.NET designer in setting up page layout.  Its never really bothered me because I'm an old school html guy and really never use the designer anyway so I didn't look into it too hard.  Since then several people have asked and expressed their wish for it to work in the VS.NET designer.  Well big thanks go out to Jan Hussaarts for figuring out why it didn't work and how to easily fix it.

It wasn't a problem with MasterPages itself, it was code I added to make it get the skin setting from the SiteSettings object stored in the HttpContext. The problem was that at design time there is no HttpContext so all it needed was a check to see if HttpContext is null before using it and now it works in the designer!

Its commited to svn for those of you working with the VS.NET Solution.