I have a VS2003 solution with 21 ASP.NET 1.1 projects in it. My goal is to eventually migrate them to 2.0 and then 4.0. There are mainly internal admin apps for different departments.
I want to create a multi-project solution now in VS2010 and migrate/re-code these one at a time in ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms in VS2010. There will be some artifacts common to all projects such as CSS, scripts and images. Could the use of Resources help with the common files and would it be possible to have a single master page for all projects?
What are the best options for creating a multi-project solution here?
From what I understand, your goal is to share resources like CSS, JS files across projects. One way to do it would be to use linked files in Visual Studio. We do it extensively in one of our solutions where we share many class files and signing keys acorss projects. Linking files basically involves putting the files in one project in the solution and then linking to them from other projects of the solution.
You have to be a little careful though during deployment of projects containing linked files as linking the file does not physically copy the file to the destination project. So even if your project has a css folder, the linked file shown under that folder in VS is not physically there in the directory structure on the disk . If you link classes, the dll for the project that has the linked class file will include the linked class, but for resource files like css, JS and common masterpage, they will not be copied over when you deploy. You can leverage build scripts or some simple batch files to handle those issues. This should solve your problem.