Kevin Dente's Blog

The Blip in the Noise
Web Projects in VS2005
Chris Szurgot posted complaints about the changes to web projects in VS2005 - especially the elimination of the project file for web projects. I quite agree with him (I've been meaning to blog about it for some time). Now, VS2003 had it's problems - the evil .webinfo file in particular. Being able to open a web project directly, without setting up a virtual dir, is brilliant. But the complete elimination of the project file is not, in my opinion, a good change.

I don't really understand the problem that they were trying to address by eliminating the project file, but it seems to do more harm than good. I've actually lost capabilities, such as the ability to selectively exclude files from a project. Also, I was hoping that the next version would supporting file links - a feature in VS2003 for non-web projects - but obviously that's impossible with the new model.

My biggest complaint, though, is that the web project model is simply very different from non-web projects. I would guess that many, if not most, web site developers will eventually create class libraries, which means that most developers will be forced to use two different development models. Why?

Published Wednesday, May 25, 2005 10:12 PM by kevindente

Comments

# re: Web Projects in VS2005@ Thursday, May 26, 2005 8:21 AM

I think having class libraries is a good thing, anything that seperates logic from presentation is good. I think the new model is a good idea, and does a better job of representing what a web site really is. Sure you could exclude files, but when you went to deploy you had to copy the entire folder so that file went along anyway.

I admit I was hesitant at first as well, but you gotta give new things a shot. After working with the model a little bit I much prefer it to the old way of doing things.

James Avery

# re: Web Projects in VS2005@ Thursday, May 26, 2005 10:57 AM

James,

Among other things, the PreCompiledWeb option takes care of excluded and unneccessary files in a web project. You precompile it, then copy from the PreCompiledWeb folder instead of the source folder.

Also, while it's true that web projects are different from other types of project (different options, different startup info, etc...) there should still be a commonality among how the projects are handled. And that means some kind of configuration/project file, I would think. But that's just me.

Chris Szurgot

# re: Web Projects in VS2005@ Thursday, May 26, 2005 1:09 PM

James,
I didn't mean to imply that class libraries are bad (although not required to separate presentation from business logic) - only that forcing the developer to use two different models is a bad thing.

Excluding files probably wasn't the best example. My main point is that a consistent developer experience is a good thing. References work differently, project properties work differently, etc.

Kevin Dente

# re: Web Projects in VS2005@ Thursday, May 26, 2005 11:10 PM

I believe that any DataLayer must be a simple code block, that they allow operations against DB.

That code block would not have to know on the Business Entities. Single to specialize it is to execute the operations (Store Procedures and SQL Sentences) against the engine DB (SQL, Oracle, DB2, etc.), with which this setting.

Finally, I invite to you to download the DataLayer.Primitives Public Version.

This is very cool Data Layer :)

DataLayer.Primitives - Readme!
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1389

Cheers,

Javier Luna
http://guydotnetxmlwebservices.blogspot.com/

Javier Luna

# re: Web Projects in VS2005@ Friday, May 27, 2005 12:51 AM

I very much agree. The change doesn't really seem to solve any problems, at least any that I've encountered over the years. Sure it's nice to be able to open a project directly from the IIS directly, but that was never really a problem, was it.

I also, totally agree, that the difference in the project model being SO different from a Winforms or other project type is problematic. Especially regarding references and the cool gee-wiz project properties window found in other project types. Why?

John Walker