Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Visual Studio Support for ASP.NET

Visual Studio 2012 offers a wide range of features to assist you in building applications: IntelliSense, code snippets, integrated debugging, CSS style support, and the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET framework are a few examples. When working with ASP.NET you'll see that many of these productivity features also apply when working with inline code, client-side JavaScript code, XML, and HTML markup.

Web Site and Web Application Projects

Visual Studio gives you two models for ASP.NET projects:

1. Web site projects

2. Web application projects

The Web application project model is very similar to other project types. The structure is based on a project file (.vbproj), and all VB code in the project compiles into a single assembly. To deploy it you copy the assembly along with markup and static content files to the server. You can create a new Web application project by selecting File ⇒ New ⇒ Project from the main menu in Visual Studio.

The Website project model was added with Visual Studio 2005. This model is designed to be very lightweight and familiar to Web developers and designers coming to Visual Studio from other tools. It uses a folder structure to define the contents of a project, enabling you to open a website just by pointing Visual Studio at a folder or a virtual directory. The default deployment model uses dynamic compilation whereby VB source files are deployed along with markup and other content files. Alternately, ...