When you are about to build a new ASP.NET web application, you will need to make a choice regard which of two project formats you will make use of, specifically an ASP.NET Web Site or an ASP.NET Web Application. Your choice of web project will control the way in which Visual Studio organizes and processes your web application starter files, the type of initial project files that are created, and how much control you have over the resulting composition of the compiled .NET assembly.
When ASP.NET was first released with .NET 1.0, the only option was to build what is now termed a web application. Under this model, you have direct control over the name and location of the compiled output assembly. As well, under this model, the in-memory partial class which contains control declarations and configurations is not in memory but rather found within another physical C# code file.
Web applications are useful when you are migrating older .NET 1.1 web sites into .NET 2.0 and higher projects. Web applications are also helpful when you wish to build a single Visual Studio 2010 Solution that can contain multiple projects (for example, the web application and three related .NET code libraries). To build an ASP.NET Web Application, you activate the File > New Project... menu item and pick a template from the Web category (Figure 32-21).
Figure 32-21 The Visual Studio Web Application Templates
You have no need to do so now; however, assume you did create a new ASP.NET Web Application project. You will find a large number of starter files (which will make sense as you work through the chapters to come), but most importantly note that each ASP.NET web page is composed of three files; the *.aspx file (for markup), the *.Designer.cs file (for designer-generated C# code), and the primary C# code file (for your event handlers, custom methods and whatnot). See Figure 32-22.
Figure 32-22 Under the Web Application model, each web page is composed of three files
In stark contrast, the Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET Web Site project templates (found under the File > New Web Site... menu option) hides the *.Designer.cs file in favor of an in-memory partial class. Moreover, ASP.NET Web Site projects support a number of specially named folders, such as App_Code. Within this folder, you can place any C# (or VB) code files that are not directly mapped to your web pages, and the runtime compiler will dynamically compile them as required. This is a great simplification to the normal act of building a dedicated .NET code library and referencing it in new projects. On a related note, a Web Site project can be pushed as-is to a production web server without the need to precompile the site as you would need to do with an ASP.NET Web Application.
In this book, I’ll make use of ASP.NET Web Site project types, as they do offer some simplifications to the process of building web applications under the .NET platform. However, regardless of which approach you take, you will have access to the same overall programming model.
Note Because the Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET project templates generate a great deal of starter code (master pages, content pages, script libraries, a log in page, etc), this book will opt to use the Blank web site template. However, once you have completed reading the ASP.NET chapters of this text, make sure you create a new ASP.NET web site project and examine this starter code first hand.