Comments on Compiled Thoughts: Web Site vs. Web Application Project

Thanks for explaining the difference. I was happy ...

2010-11-11T21:09:46.875-05:00

Thanks for explaining the difference. I was happy to see support for the web site model in VS2008.

I think it really depends on client needs also. I ...

2010-05-19T07:11:35.758-04:00

I think it really depends on client needs also. I recently lead a website project consisting of over 6000 pages for a client. Each page having dynamic and static regions. This client has it's own webteam who need to be able to make small changes many, many times a day. In this scenario, a WAP does not make sense. There is also no performance gain, at all, when talking precompiled assemblies vs dynamically compiled dll created by the app_code folder. This has been verified by Scott Gu and makes perfect sense - your only performance gain is first request compilation, but for a site which gets 60,000 concurrent users, this is meaningless; The site never "cools down" so the dynamically compiled dll just stays up. We have a small core WAP setup for unit testing, but the deployed client site is a website project - so it's the reverse of what you are saying here, even for a massive scale project. In practise, flexibility can be very business critical.

I find that the WAP is way too time consuming. Hav...

2010-05-14T08:37:33.916-04:00

I find that the WAP is way too time consuming. Having to stop and start the debugger to make changes takes up too much time. We develop sites with hundreds of pages and the compilation time of the WAP is too long. The web site project allows changes to be made much faster.

And just so everyone knows, the website project DOES have a project file. When you open a website in VS a project file is created in your documents folder. You can copy this file anywhere and use it like a regular project file.

It was a good read. I have worked with both WAP an...

2010-05-10T04:34:26.209-04:00

It was a good read. I have worked with both WAP and website projects. But now I have to convert one WAP to Website. Any idea where I can get information regarding this migration?

Thank you for posting this. I'm relatively new...

2010-03-16T22:41:33.372-04:00

Thank you for posting this. I'm relatively new to .NET and recently took on a project that was developed as a WAP. I had only worked with sites before that, and this has explained some of the things I couldn't understand.

How do you work with designers when you use WAP as...

2009-10-10T09:05:05.153-04:00

How do you work with designers when you use WAP assuming they use one of the microsoft expression products like Expression Web?

Thanks a lot for putting the time into this - it&#...

2009-09-26T18:06:30.711-04:00

Thanks a lot for putting the time into this - it's just what I was looking for.

Great post, thanks for sharing! I've been work...

2009-06-18T10:08:52.024-04:00

Great post, thanks for sharing!
I've been working almost only with website projects and that worked fine for small/quick websites. WAP seems a bit more work, but I suppose you perhaps get more speed during runtime due to less code to compile.
I also found it hard with WAP to just copy/paste already existing aspx pages from other projects, since they wouldn't compile at first try. Besides that, if you paste some code to an aspx page with some server controls, they won't be available in the code-behind, unless you manually declare them in the somepage.designer.cs file.
These were my first impressions about the WAP project type. Please let me know if my findings are wrong!

Cheers,
Felipe

A Web app is needed if you want to use nunit for u...

2009-04-10T18:18:00.000-04:00

A Web app is needed if you want to use nunit for unit tests. With a website that's pretty difficult (impossible?). Likewise all the other open source unit test tools can be used with a web app and you can then use NAnt and CruiseControl too. The .dll files have meaningful names and you can include references for for test code. A web app is a tiny bit more work; but crucially important if you must write unit tests.

There seems to be no way to convert from a website to a web app.

Hi,

I have been a .Net developer since it's...

2009-01-22T10:20:00.000-05:00

Hi,

I have been a .Net developer since it's inception (I was C++ developer prior to than). I have worked a lot more on WAP than website projects. I must say for many applications, WAP makes more sense; however, I have worked for small ASP companies; in these cases, website projects work a lot better than WAP because changes can be made quicker. In case of an urgent push, it is a lot easier to make the push as a website project. I know many people are fans of WAP (I was one of them); nevertheless, I am pragmatic and I have found out that when you maintain a site; it is more convenient to use a website project.