Windows Developer Power Tools

8.9 Bringing Web Application Projects Back to Visual Studio 2005

Visual Studio 2005 introduced a big change in the way the IDE handles web applications. Instead of including a specific project type, as in Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 introduced the new concept of the “Web Site.” The Web Site is like a project, but it doesn’t include an actual project type. It works well for small sites, but when you try to use it in an enterprise application, you quickly run into a number of issues:

• References are stored in the solution file, which means you have to include them in multiple places if there are multiple solutions (quite common in enterprise applications).

• All the files in a directory are included; there is no way to exclude a file from the project. This sounds good, but it actually introduces a big problem when using a build server: you can no longer rely on your project to exclude unused files. You have to make sure you delete all files on every build instead of on a set schedule.

• Performance degrades as you add items to the site. When the site reaches hundreds of files, compiling it in Visual Studio starts to become a serious time sink.

• The site is not compiled down to a single assembly at compile-time; you have to actually deploy the code to the server, where it is compiled on the fly into individual assemblies.

• It is hard to convert 2003 projects to 2005. There are often more issues with the project conversion than with any actual Framework changes.

The ASP.NET team heard ...