In some cases you would like to add some of your own pages to the SharePoint Central Administration site to add farm or web application level functionality. There are several ways to do so. You can add your pages to the layouts folder and create the navigation elements via custom actions. Using best practice your page or code behind will inherit from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsBasePage class. Doing so will result that your page mend for central administration is also accessible for other site collections, which you wouldn't want to do. Instead of deploying your pages to the layouts folder you must deploy them to the ADMIN folder in the 12 hive. This way you avoid that your page will be accessible to other site collections on your server. This is more like it, but still missing something essential.
Instead of deriving from the LayoutsBasePage class you can inherit from the GlobalAdminPageBase class. This class exposes a few methods and properties that come in handy when creating central administration page. In fact you also have 2 classes that inherit from the GlobalAdminPageBase class, being the OperationsPage and the ApplicationManagementpage. Not many extra in these classes besides the fact that they override the PageToRedirectOnCancel property to the appropiate page (operations.aspx or applications.aspx). If you create your pages this way they will be redirected to the correct section when you hit the cancel button.
All pages reside in the Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages namespace. Be aware that you will not find the these classes in the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll assembly, but you need to reference the Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.Administration.dll assemby located in the /config/adminbin folder in the 12 hive. This assembly is not deployed to the GAC, so pretty private and secure. If you want to reference the assembly in your VS projects you'll need to browse for it, add it and be sure not to copy the assembly locally.
When you build your SharePoint solution you'll need to make sure that you add an entry in your manifest file to point to the assembly. You can do so by adding the DLLReferencePath property. Also be aware that if you are using the WSPBuilder Extensions for Visual studio your Build WSP command will not work as the command line parameter for WSP Builder to add the DLLReferencePath is not there! You'll need to create your own bat file to build and deploy your WSP. Add parameter -DLLReferencePath "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\CONFIG\ADMINBIN" and everything will work fine.
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