"New Web Project Model Option Coming for VS 2005"

New Web Project Model Option Coming for VS 2005

"One of the things that we’ve been working on the last few months is a new web project model option for Visual Studio 2005 that we are tentatively calling “ASP.NET Web Projects”. Our plan is to have an initial preview web-download version of it available for people to install on top of VS 2005 sometime in the next few weeks.

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Some technical information on the new project option

The new project model’s project, build, and compilation semantics will be pretty much the same as with the VS 2003 web project model. Specifically:

1) All code within the project will compile into a single assembly (that gets built and persisted in the \bin directory on each compile).

2) All files contained within the project are defined within a project file (as well as the assembly references and other project meta-data settings). Files under the web’s file-system root that are not defined in the project file will not be logically considered part of the web project. You will also now be able to define classes and types anywhere in the project structure (there is no longer a need to define them under app_code).

3) The compilation system uses a standard MSBuild based compilation process. This can be extended and customized using standard MSBuild extensibility rules.

Two of the big changes/improvements we are making over the VS 2003 model are:

1) We will not use/require FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) in order to open and edit these web projects. There also will not be any requirement to store your web projects under inetpub\wwwroot. Instead, you can just define a standard project file for your web project anywhere on disk and add/open/manage it directly (this also means no more .webinfo files and hard-coded http:// paths in the solution file). This should make organizing and managing your projects much easier.

2) We are adding the ability to optionally use the Cassini-based built-in web-server with these projects (alternatively you can obviously also use IIS). You will be able to create a new web project using this model, add a few pages, hit F5 to compile the code-behinds and other classes into a single assembly, and automatically launch Cassini to run and debug it. All of this will also work in a non-admin user account (so you can login to Windows and develop as a normal user).

The new model will fully support all of the new VS 2005 WYSIWYG designer changes (no more html reformatting, master page/theme designer support, etc), as well as all the improvements made in the html source editor.

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There's tons of good info in this post, too much to copy and quote here. If you're a VS.Net/VS 2003 Web Project developer, or a not happy with the current VS2005 web project development scheme, you have to check out this post...

It's cool how quickly MS is responding to this need/feedback. And responding not with a hack, but a "equal but better" offering.

(via Chris Wallace - New Web Project Option for VS2005 (coming soon))