Question

First of all, when to use what and the overall differences between them has already been answered before. But I couldn’t find an answer to this question:

Where can I check if my Visual Studio project is a Web Application or a Web Site?

Answer 1

Personally, one tell tale sign for me is whether the project folder actually contains a project file, or not.

You can see the icons differ slightly in VS – a web application has a layered world->docs->language icon and a web site just consists of world->docs.

Also, once opened within VS, right-clicking will display Properties and Property Pages for web applications and web sites respectively; further, on clicking this option you will be greeted with a dialog for the former and MDI tabbed form for the latter – the latter also exposes more functionality to control pre and post build steps and so forth.

A a web application will also display Properties and References special folders as part of the project tree in the Solution Explorer, whereas a web site does not necessarily; unless manually created for some reason (but they still won’t be special – web sites use the bin folder for their references).