Software Rockstar

I recently posted about how the lack of project files in Visual Studio 2005 Web Site Projects make it difficult to deploy web applications.

I just came across this add-in for Visual Studio 2005 that actually addresses this very issue. It’s called the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects (WAP) and is available as a free download from Microsoft. WAP provides following features to ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site Projects in Visual Studio 2005:

1. A project file that contains references to all web content as well as any assembly references.
2. Compilation into single assembly that is built into the bin folder.
3. Pre and Post Build actions.

While WAP is aimed at developers converting web applications from Visual Studio 2003, I think that it’s an invaluable tool for anyone creating web applications using Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft screwed up royally in Visual Studio 2005 when it comes to deployment of web projects. It seems like they initially assumed that everyone would use web site publishing feature for deployments, but that certainly is not the case. Later they came up with the Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects (WDP) add-in hoping to rectify their oversight, but WDP is nothing more than a lame bandage over a broken bone. The departure of project files from ASP.NET projects serves as an icing on the cake! And what exactly were they thinking when they decided that web projects can’t have any more than two build configurations (Debug and Release)?

While I really like .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, I just can’t come to peace with the fact they did not think through deployment features of ASP.NET projects.