Beginning ASP.NET for Visual Studio 2015

Chapter 2Building an Initial ASP.NET Application

What you will learn in this chapter:

• The differences between web site projects and web application projects in Visual Studio
• The project types available in Visual Studio and what they mean to our sample application
• How to create a new ASP.NET site in Visual Studio
• File types and directory structures in both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC
• The differences between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC

Code Downloads for this Chapter:

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/beginningaspnetforvisualstudio on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 02 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

Now that you have installed Visual Studio and have an understanding of the requirements for the sample application, it's time to get started building it. Visual Studio makes the creation of the application shell (the initial directory structure and commonly used files) very straightforward if you are using either ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC. Creating a project that enables you to do both, as we will do here, is not quite as easy because it is not a traditional approach. However, there is no better way to see the two different approaches than by doing them side by side.

This chapter covers the different aspects of each approach, ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC, including file type and directory structure, as well as the differences that you will see as you work through the two different ...