VS2003 Style Web Application Projects

Posted Wednesday, January 11, 2006 9:12 AM by C-Dog's .NET Tip of the Day

Ok, well if you hated the new web project system in ASP.NET 2.0, you will be glad to know that they now have in beta (well its been out for quite some time), something called a Web Application Project which is very similar to what they had in Visual Studio 2003.

The biggest benefit to this is that you actually have a default namespace and you can set properties on the web project just like you could in Visual Studio 2003. However there are a number of cons. The .csproj file is back, so you are back to dealing with crap when someone has it checked out.

Secondly, you lost all benefits of the partial class system. Normally in ASP.NET 2.0, when you drop a control or whatever onto an .aspx page you don't have to have it declared anywhere. Well now, since this is like VS2003, it will put the declaration in PageName.aspx.designer.cs (very similar to windows forms). This is in fact very lame. On top of that this beta preview doesn't do that for you, so you have to do it manually (even more lame).

The only other benefit that the ASP.NET team claims is that it could make the migration process easier. I'm not sure, maybe it will. The last thing to note is that it compiles all files into a single DLL. So in my opinion by using this, you are losing a lot of the key beneifts of upgrading to ASP.NET 2.0.

If you still want to check it out, you can find it at the link below.

Web Application Project

Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=233