Professional Visual Studio® 2008

32.1. Web Application vs. Web Site Projects

With the release of Visual Studio 2005, a radically new type of project was introduced — the Web Site project. Much of the rationale behind the move to a new project type was based on the premise that web sites, and web developers for that matter, are fundamentally different from other types of applications (and developers), and would therefore benefit from a different model. Although Microsoft did a good job extolling the virtues of this new project type, many developers found it difficult to work with, and clearly expressed their displeasure to Microsoft.

Fortunately, Microsoft listened to this feedback, and a short while later released a free add-on download to Visual Studio that provided support for a new Web Application project type. It was also included with Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2005.

The major differences between the two project types are fairly significant. The most fundamental change is that a Web Site project does not contain a Visual Studio project file (.csproj or .vbproj), whereas a Web Application project does. As a result, there is no central file that contains a list of all the files in a Web Site project. Instead, the Visual Studio solution file contains a reference to the root folder of the Web Site project, and the content and layout are directly inferred from its files and sub-folders. If you copy a new file into a sub-folder of a Web Site project using Windows Explorer, then that file, by definition, belongs ...