SharePoint 2013 - MasterPage Installation Problem

Question

When I republish my MasterPage through Visual Studio 2012, I have an issue with the old master page not being able to be deleted.

I get a error message saying that a conflict could not be resolved, but the deployment indicates success anyway.

It seems the Master Page can't be deleted. I've even tried manually deleting through SharePoint Designer but it tells me that the page is referenced by other pages.

What works is the following:

1. I move the page to a save directory after making another page the Master through "Site Settings"
2. Through "Master page" under site setting--I deploy my new MasterPage. Then make it the Master Page through Site Settings.
3. Only then am I able to delete the original page from the Save directory

Answer 1

Here is a working example of the Elements.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <Module Name="MasterPageModule" List="116" Url="_catalogs/masterpage">
      <File Path="MasterPageModule\Custom.master" Url="Custom.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" ReplaceContent="TRUE"/>
    </Module>
  </Elements>

The important point is to use these two attributes:

Type="GhostableInLibrary" ReplaceContent="TRUE"   

SharePoint module should look something like this:

Also. I am not 100% sure, but if you've got CKSDev installed, you can update your master page right from Visual Studio without deploying it each time.