# Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released

Scott Gu talks about "VS 2005 Web Application Projects" as if it's a big deal and a big part of this service pack - wanna enlighten the rest of us as to what that actually is and WHY it's a big deal?

# Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released

Visual Studio 2005 initially only supported "Web Site Projects", which differed from the web projects that were created in 2003, which used a project file based structure where all code in the project is compiled into a single assembly.

The uproar from people over the change (and the pains of migrating) forced Microsoft to add "Web Application Projects" as an additional option providing similar options.

Basically the only differences I can remember (having not used web site projects much) are that there are some cool things you can do with deployments, some better integration with automatic launching/debugging from within Visual Studio/Cassini (including the ability to edit and continue in the middle of debugging), and you can edit your codebehind (.cs or .vb) files in place (without needing to rebuild your solution). Obviously with both web site and web app projects you can edit aspx files without needing a rebuild, but with web site projects it'd automatically sort that for codebehind files too - I'm not sure how it does that, it sounds like there's possibly some overhead involved there to me. To make a sweeping generalisation, Web Site Projects seemed like they were more aimed at hobbyists and small sites, and didn't feel quite right for some larger applications.

With the service pack it's no longer an addon - Microsoft have admitted they screwed up by omitting it :)

I tried to find a good 'offical' summary of the differences between Web Site Projects and Web Application Projects (apart from the fact that "they're different") and this is the best I could find:

Visual Studio 2005 changes the Web project model in many ways. For example, a project file is no longer needed because all files in the Web application folder are considered part of the Web project.

The new Web project model affects the conversion of files such as ASP.NET Web Forms pages (.aspx files), ASP.NET user controls (.asxc files), the Global.asax file, and the Web.config file. The exact changes made in these files depend on the programming language of the project that is being converted.