VS 2005 Web Application Projects installed! *breaths a breath of fresh air* – level 100

Upon hearing the announcement that Web Application Projects has been released, I wanted to get EZWeb converted
over as soon as possible (I’m close to making another release). 
I’d been limping along with the default web site option in Whidbey, and
I didn’t like it at all. 

First, you can download the VS 2005 add-in here.  There isn’t an automatic port of a VS 2005 website, but it was easy enough to do.  Here were my steps:

  1. Add new web application project to my solution. 
  2. In Win Explorer, copy the entire contents of my web site project to the web application folder.
  3. Delete my web site folder.
  4. Remove the website from my solution.
  5. Show all files in the web application.
  6. Explicitly include everything except bin and obj
  7. Add any assembly references necessary to the new project.
  8. Set any post-build events that you’ve been jerry-rigging up to this point.
  9. Run a build.  You’ll notice it fails on control declarations in code-behind files.
  10. Right click on the web project and run “Convert to Web Application”.  This adds an explicit partial class to  your code-behinds that hold your control declarations from the markup file.
  11. Run the build again.  It passed for me at this point.  I ran my application, and all was well.
  12. Run all unit tests and integration tests.  They all passed for me.

This project model is so much easier to use for real web applications
(that aren’t just web _sites_).  Kudos to the ASP.NET team for
getting this patch out.

If you are using Resharper 2.0 (beta), you’ll notice a slight
difference in navigating to files.  CTRL+N will locate the ascx.cs
and ascx.designer.cs files since they are C# code files.  To get
to the ascx files, you’ll need to use CTRL+SHIFT+N.