Question

I’m used to websites in Visual Studio, but I want to know the differences between a website and web project. Are they interchangeable?

The biggest difference I could find is that, a project is pre-compiled however I saw it mentioned that a normal website can also be pre-compiled as an option.

Answer 1

For me the biggest difference is the relationship between the pages. In a website project, each page is essentially its only little project which is, or can be, compiled separately from the rest of the pages in the application.

In a web application, the entire project is essentially compiled into a single DLL, very much akin to a class library project.

Some other differences:

• You can do live edits of web sites project on a deployed server. Open up the file, make an edit, and the next time the page is visited it will be re-compiled. Some people may consider this a bad thing.
• A website has no project file (e.g. .csproj), which can make persisting settings with a project challenging.