ASP.Net Website and ASP.Net Web Application

Question

Hi What is Difference between ASP.Net Website and ASP.Net Web Application ?

Satyapriya Nayak · Answer

Hi Arun Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects Area Web application projects Web site projects Project file structure A Visual Studio project file (.csproj or .vbproj) stores information about the project such as the list of files that are included in the project and any project-to-project references. There is no project file (.csproj or .vbproj). All the files in a folder structure are automatically included in the site. Compilation You explicitly compile the source code on the computer that is used for development or source control. By default compilation of code files (excluding .aspx and .ascx files) produces a single assembly. The source code is typically compiled dynamically (automatically) by ASP.NET on the server the first time a request is received after the site has been installed or updated. You can precompile the site (compile in advance on a development computer or on the server). By default compilation produces multiple assemblies. Namespaces Explicit namespaces are added to pages controls and classes by default. Explicit namespaces are not added to pages controls and classes by default but you can add them manually. Deployment You copy the assembly to a server. The assembly is produced by compiling the application. Visual Studio provides tools that integrate with the IIS Web deployment tool to automate many deployment tasks. You copy the application source files to a computer that has IIS installed on it. If you precompile the site on a development computer you copy the assemblies produced by compilation to the IIS server. Visual Studio provides tools for deployment but they do not automate as many deployment tasks as the tools available for Web application projects. Please refer the below link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd547590.aspx Thanks

Shakuntala Gaur · Answer

Web Site Web Site is what you deploy to an ASP.NET web server such as IIS. Just a bunch of files and folders. There's nothing in a Web Site that ties you to Visual Studio (there's no project file). Code-generation and compilation of web pages (such as .aspx .ascx .master) is done dynamically at runtime  and changes to these files are detected by the framework and automatically re-compiled. You can put code that you want to share between pages in the special App_Code folder or you can pre-compile it and put the assembly in the Bin folder. Web Application Web Application is a special Visual Studio project. The main difference with Web Sites is that when you build the project all the code files are compiled into a single assembly which is placed in the bin directory. You don't deploy code files to the web server. Instead of having a special folder for shared code files you can put them anywhere just like you would do in class library. Because Web Applications contains files that are not meant to be deployed such as project and code files there's a Publish command in Visual Studio to output a Web Site to a specified location.