Using a Page Specific Master Page in SharePoint 2010

It is a common misunderstanding that you cannot have page specific masterpages in SharePoint. The standard configuration of the MasterPageFile setting in the Page directive is to use the well known ~masterurl/default.master and ~masterurl/custom.master dynamic tokens that at run-time are replaced with the site-wide 'Site Master Page' and 'System Master Page' settings. So using these tokens don't allow for having page specific masterpages in SharePoint.

There are, however, two additional tokens, the site-collection and site relative ~sitecollection/<central master page> and ~site/<local master page> static tokens from Windows SharePoint Services 3.

You can still use these static tokens in SharePoint 2010 as shown in this example:

<%@ Page language="C#" MasterPageFile="~site/_catalogs/masterpage/JBV/SiteCenterMasterPage.master" Inherits="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPage, Microsoft.SharePoint,Version=14.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

Note how you must specify the site-collection or site relative path of the master page file location in addition to the name of the master page file.

So using the static tokens works like a breeze for web part pages in SharePoint 2010 also. I haven't tested if the Publishing feature's page layouts still are limited to the dynamic tokens. For application pages the ability to use a customized master page is new in SharePoint 2010.