Visual Studio Web Application Project Preview and Deployment Issues

During the previous couple of days I played a little bit with Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project Preview. Let's say I converted a certain web site from the core Visual Studio web site model to Web Application Project Model completely using its (and ASP.NET 2.0) major features, among others:

1. designer codebehind files
2. debugging with Cassini
3. creating references and compiling to the single assembly
4. master pages
5. control libraries
6. Microsoft.Web.Atlas
7. etc

It worked great. I had some trouble doing a lot of manual work but at the end everything seems working OK. Then I removed a web site from the solution and also a web deployment project I used to deploy the web site before.

BTW, I didn't like web deployment project since even if you use incremental builds it is still not obvious what you have to deploy since the whole source is generated from scratch when you build it (with file timestamps generated accordingly). So you have to deploy the entire stuff to the production server. OK, I thought that the new web application project model (because of the fact that it works very much alike Visual Studio 2003 model) will provide easier deployment. I just x-copied as*x/master/dll files. It refused to work until I had to x-copy all code-behind files all together also. It said something like: "Hey man, I'm missing a codebehind file MyFile.master.cs". Weird !

IMHO, ASP.NET 2.0 deployment model is not ready yet, because:

1. using web-site model you have to use web deployment add-on to deploy effectively
2. hard to manage incremental updates since all the source is generated from scratch
3. using web application project model you have to deploy all codebehind (?)

What do you think ?

Update: Scott was right as he pointed out that I had "codefile" instead of "codebehind" in the page declaration of my pages and controls. This caused the deployment issue. However the application still works, it just has to have all the codebehind stuff together with it :) I'm doing search and replace work right now...

Update 2: I have replaced all declarations of "codefile" to "codebehind". And deployed everything (this time only as*x/master and bin dlls). Everything worked great. One thing I noticed - it seems to work much faster than website (or mixed) model. Or may be it just seems to me ?

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Hi Anatoly,

You don't need to deploy any code-behind files with the Web Application Projects -- you can just copy the .aspx/.master files and the associated code-behind (same model as VS 2003).

Can you send me an email with the error you were seeing when you tried deploying the files? My guess is that you had a file with a codefile= reference in it (as opposed to the codebehind= that the web application model uses). Could this be a spare file you had in the same directly (and perhaps the cause of the issue)?

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Scott

thanks for your reply.
I have send you an email with screenshot (and some details) attached.

Your guess is right. I had "codefile" instead of "codebehind".

Just one more thing.
During the development, the compiler forced me to create all the designer.cs declarations as if it is web project model, while it was a "mixed" web model :)