Question

I am doing a small audit of a fairly robust ASP app and CMS for a client (does a good bit more than a regular CMS) and started looking into the code. (edit: This is for a quick overview prior to engaging a full fledge ASP shop.)

I am coming from a background mainly in PHP, Node.js, and Ruby but when I look at the layout of the directories and files it looks horrible. It reminds me of old PHP 4 apps with files all over the place.

My question is, is this still good coding practice in ASP? I expected to find a much cleaner/easier to understand structure with a more custom app like this. Much like the Rails/Zend/etc of the other languages. Here is a screenshot of a few of the files from the webroot.

A side question would be, are there better ways to organize files in ASP? I have not coded with ASP in 6-8 years, and it was still not very much I used it for.

Answer 1

This isn’t ASP, it’s ASP.NET; I also note it’s WebForms, not MVC, which has very different layout.

Anyway, the directory structure is a mess, it’s horrible. Here’s what’s wrong with it:

• Unholy mishmash between static HTML files and ASP.NET webforms files
• Code files (e.g. contact.aspx.cs) are present on the server when the application looks to be compiled (because it has a bin directory), so they shouldn’t be there at all.
• There is no consistency in folder and filename casing. Some are all lowercase, others are TitleCase.
• You appear to have duplicate folders, what is the difference between “Images” and “img”?
• What on earth is “missing” and “layouts” for?
• Duplicate, disorganised files index.html, index1.html, etc.

Then there are a few other concerns, but those are down to developer preference:

• Generally, projects only have one or two MasterPage files, so it doesn’t make sense for them to be outside of the root folder. I put my *.master files directly in the root of the application.
• Images related to a stylesheet should be placed in the same directory as the stylesheet rather than in a sibling folder (I’m assuming the images referenced by the stylesheet in the “css” folder are actually located in “img”). This is bad because it complicates the CSS file (as it has relative paths inside it) and makes your application more brittle.
• Fonts seems to contain font files, again, referenced by your stylesheets. They should all go under a single “styles” folder.
• Any image “content” (i.e. <img src="" /> elements), not images used in stylesheets, should be kept separate from stylesheet images, I’m assuming this why you have the confusing “img” vs “Images” folders.

As for the correct way to do it, ASP.NET WebForms does not lead itself to tidy, well-organised applications. Because each (non-rewritten) URI corresponds directly to an *.aspx file it means the filesystem layout has to match the website layout. I’m afraid there isn’t much you can do about it unless you implement ASP.NET Routing.

I also suggest eliminating all of your HTML files and converting them into ASPX files that make full use of UserControls and MasterPages as appropriate.