For those of you following the MVC releases, you will see something new in your File->New for MVC3 RC: _ViewStart.cshtml (_ViewStart.vbhtml for you VBers). This is a common place to dry out view dependencies. The most common view dependency is the MasterView it will use. To that end, the default _ViewStart page you get from a File->New MVC3 project has just the: 1: @{ 2: Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.csh... 3: } This seems to be done by convention. The view must be named “_viewstart.cshtml”...