Chris Szurgot's Blog

Earlier today, I commented about my issues with Web Project behavior in VS 2005. Based on comments to that, and feedback on the Visual Studio 2005 feedback site, a lot of people are feeling pain from this. Reading through the issues people have been having and the proposed work-arounds, it seems like throwing out the baby with the bath water as most of the issues could be resolved by simply adjusting the way web projects files work, as opposed to throwing out the file altogether.

I've created a suggestion that they re-instate web project files, perhaps as an optional component to resolve a lot of the issues with dependencies and source control. Please vote!

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackId=FDBK27963

Further comments: Based on the rationale I've seen for this decision (to reduce the number of "special" files that need to be deployed), a good solution would appear to be to include a project file as an optional component. It can have an option to track all files in the web project, or only exclusion. (Thus reducing contention for the file) It can also have an option to store DLLs in the project, or gather them at compile time. This would satisfy the small project, as well as the larger enterprise projects.