Is there such a thing? Maybe there should be, I don’t think Microsoft built anything like this but is there a similar format or framework for ASP.NET that let’s you deploy an archive — that is — your ASP.NET web application, or module that works in the same way?
A xap file is a self-contained archive. I’m particularly interested in the things they’re showing with Silverlight 4 and application partitioning. In that you can drop in additional xap files that extend or show up as new things in your app without recompiling the existing stuff.
I guess the closest thing would be an assembly. It is totally possible to compile an ASP.NET website into a single assembly. Basically you would need to compile your project normally, then precompile the website and then you could combine all those resulting assemblies into a single assembly using ILMerge.