Sometimes my application has a section with normal ASP.NET requests that doesn't go through the ASP.NET MVC pipeline. I still want to integrate it with the ASP.NET MVC section of my app, using the same master page for example. The ViewMasterPage validates to make sure that the page being rendered is a ViewPage with the same type, so you can't use a normal page with a ViewMasterPage. If you run a ViewPage without an ASP.NET MVC context, all of the html helper methods will throw NullReferenceExceptions.
The solution to this issue is to make your page inherit from ViewPage, and then spoof the...