Question

We have a web site built as an ‘ASP.NET Website’ type project, rather than the ‘ASP.NET Web Application’ type.

Aside from the obvious debugging advantages that the app type offers and access to the designer files for each page:

1. What, if anything, can be gained by switching from website project type to app?

2. Are there performance losses with one over the other?

3. How much work is involved in switching an existing (dev) site from website to app? Is it as simple as creating another site as app type and adding these existing aspx files and libraries to it?

   This question (How To Convert ASP.NET Website to ASP.NET Web Application) seems to cover the steps.

   • What are the risks (if any?)

   • How much work should we plan on?

4. Are there differences in how HTTP Application deals with requests or how handlers work between the two types?

Anything we forgot to think of?

Answer 1

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730880%28VS.80%29.aspx#wapp_topic5

That describes some of the features and advantages/disadvantages between the two.

The main reason to use the web project versus the web site is that the web site is dynamically compiled which tends to incur a performance hit whereas the web project is precompiled. You should gain performance moving to the web project method. You also gain control over the naming of your final compiled assemblies.

The amount of work really depends on how many pages are in your old site.

I don’t think the .NET framework handles code differently in the web site versus the web project. It’s really the configuration of the file structure, the lack of a central project file, and the method of compilation that ends up being different between the two.