While ASP.NET 2.0 represents a hugemspaint leap forward in productivity and overall functionality for web developers, those of us who were using ASP.NET 1.x prior to the release of Visual Studio 2005 may have had some trouble coming to grips with the new project system in version two.
Basically the concept of a project was removed in Visual Studio 2005 and we pretty much mounted file systems paths directly. The fallout was that a number of consistencies between the various project types in Visual Studio were lost.
The good news is that the ASP.NET team has listened to feedback from the developer community and they have pulled together in record time an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 which restores the 2003–style project system for ASP.NET projects - they are called Web Application Projects.
The Web Application Project add-in is still in BETA at the moment and there are a number of issues that need to be addressed before you could really use it in a production setting (Scott Guthrie provides more details). Having said that I have been using the web application projects exclusively for the last month or so and I can say that I don’t really want to go back.
Some of the features that really do it for me are:
- Plain old project references ala class libraries.
- Plain old properties page ala class libraries.
- Smoother integration with source control (class library style projects seem to be the most tested path).