Web applications in Visual Studio 2005

One of the things that annoyed me with Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 is the web “project” type.

The main problem is that these projects are not treated as traditional applications, but in order to please the ad-hoc web developer crowd they are treated as collections of files with no specific project options or compilation process — instead compiled on-the-fly by the web server.

Now for managing day-to-day web sites I can understand this. You don’t want a small change to one page bringing down the whole site because of a compilation error.

But there are other scenarios whereby you are developing a web application, perhaps as a front-end to your main system and you want that compile error to show up here and now. You want compilation options because you’re not intending on shipping the source out to other people.

Thankfully I’m not alone in this scenario and Microsoft have released a second beta of the VS 2005 Web Application Project. They have also updated the beta of the VS 2005 Web Deployment Project to work with it.

The Web Deployment Project lets you right click and built to remote and test servers…. Nice.

You can keep an eye on the developments over at ScottGu’s excellent blog.

[)amien