VS 2005 Beta 2 IDE and web projects evaluation – level 200

I’m going to post my experiences with VS 2005 Beta 2 so you can hopefully save some time when you migrate. My company has converted completely and has deprecated v1.1. My group is a large web project with several class libraries. I’m excited and disappointed with the new web projects. I’ve been working for 2 weeks now with the new web project, and I like most of what they’ve done. The following are the things I don’t like:

No more pre or post build events

No project references (just .dll files copied to the bin directory)

partial classes hide code I’m interested in and hides things from me.

I’m almost to the point where I’m going to use a class library project to develop my ASP.NET 2.0 web projects as well. I will sacrifice some designer support, but I don’t depend on that anyway. If you are using class library projects in v1.1, don’t run your project through the converter. Just open the project in VS 2005 and keep it as a class library. It will be a seemless upgrade with few problems.

When I start new web projects from scratch, I’ll be using class libraries. The new web site layout will be good for hobbyists developing with VWD, but it has too many limitations for me. I really like a lot of what they’ve done, but a few things just ruin a good thing.

Martijn Boland 11:58 pm on August 6, 2005

I can confirm that an ASP.NET project that is a class library upgrades perfectly, including pre- and post build events. Just tried it today with Cuyahoga and everything ran fine. There was only a naming conflict because ASP.NET 2.0 also appears to have a Menu class :).

Btw, I still had full designer support on the .aspx pages only hitting F7 didn’t bring up the code-behind. What designer support are you missing with Class Library Projects and is it diiferent in VS.NET 2005?
Jeffrey Palermo 6:37 pm on August 7, 2005

When I want to use the old CodeBehind model instead of partial classes, double-clicking on a button in the designer puts my new event handler method in the markup view instead of the code-behind. Otherwise, the designer is mostly functional.

Thanks for the testimony.
Eric Newton 2:47 pm on August 10, 2005

I didnt know you could do it as a Class Library… I agree with you, I dont much care for the “new” compilation model for v2.0.

Although I do like the partial class use, whats so wrong with making all the codebehinds into dependencies for the dll? Its so much cleaner and references are tracked a lot better.
Bob Archer 3:12 am on August 11, 2005

Jeff,

Just finished listening to your dot net rocks episode, and went searching on using class lib project vs web project. I’m still not sure of the mainbenefit.

Anyway, as far as Pre-Build / Post-Build events. Isn’t the VS 2005 solution now an XML file for MSBuild. And doesn’t the VS 2005 IDE use MSBuild in the background to build stuff.

If this is the case, then you should be able to modify the solution to do your pre/post build events. Of course, I think the new Web Apps are designed so you don’t have to build each time you make a change. That supposed to be an advantage so you can now edit / refresh / test, no need for the build step as you have in 1.1.

BOb
Jeffrey Palermo 2:14 pm on August 11, 2005

Bob, Thanks for the comment. The main benefit of the class library is that you don’t have the binding with IIS in v1.1. In 2.0, you can void the headaches of a projectless web site. Working alone, it’s easy to deploy a site manually, but in a team, everything needs to automated. This is where the problems begin, and we have a step backward from v1.1.

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Programming with Palermo

Jeffrey Palermo, Microsoft MVP, Author, Speaker, Clear Measure Chief Architect, Azure DevOps Expert

VS 2005 Beta 2 IDE and web projects evaluation – level 200

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