[How Do I:] Determine Whether to Use a Web Site or a Web Application Project

In this video Chris Pels will contrast the differences between an ASP.NET web site project and a web application project. Learn the considerations for using one type of project or the other. First, learn about the major attributes of a web application project including its folder basis. Next, see the major attributes of a web site project and its traditional Visual Studio project based nature which provides more granularity and flexibility including adding classes, dealing with namespaces, and referencing user controls or pages programmatically. The compilation model for each type of web site is then discussed along with alternatives that include the use of the aspnet_compiler.exe and aspnet_merge.exe utilities and the Visual Studio 2008 web deployment project.

Presented by Chris Pels

Duration: 29 minutes, 57 seconds

Date: 22 August 2008

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Comments : 17

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benfree : On August 25, 2008 12:11 PM said:

Thanks Chris..Excellent video lesson. I always wondered about the differences between these two project types, now I know thanks to your lesson..

May I request video lessons on the following topics?

1. How to sign assemblies and put them into GAC? More details about GAC and why to use it will be most useful.

2. How to develop an Asynchronous web page process? Like a time consuming process which can be called asynchronously and the page will display a progress bar until the process is completed..

Thanks!!

pthalacker : On August 25, 2008 1:14 PM said:

What I am hearing in this video is inconsistent with my experience. I thought I could recompile my web site and just put out the aspz and dll associated with the single folder, but I got an error that the new web page dll could not find the application dll (it had been renamed by the recompilation) So I was forced to redeploy all the dlls and therefore all the aspx pages since they are dependent on the random-generated name of their code-behind file. I must be doing something wrong. I would love to just deploy a single folder rather than a whole application.

asater : On August 25, 2008 3:02 PM said:

thank you

jehazlett : On August 25, 2008 3:59 PM said:

Thanks - nice vid.

softly : On August 26, 2008 4:15 AM said:

Hello everybody. Excelent video but better explained, thanks for posting.

Regardind web application projects, I'm wondering how to get rid off some undesired files and folders that appear when I use web deployment projects. It's courious but if I use them over web site applications, everything I get in the output folder is useful. Does anyone know it?

On the other hand I've always had a question about web projects combined with Team Foundation Server. Whatever is the video I see about TFS and Web Sites I always find they work in local mode (ie, they test the website using http://localhost:XXXX/demowebsite).

How can I develop a web site / web application project with TFS if I need the website to be on a server different than the local machine? Does Web application projects o web sites allow me to do this?

Thank you very much in advance,

Miquel Parejo