Web Projects Boycott, Long Live Class Libraries

I try to be a good programmer. I understand that there will be other programmers who will come after me and have to maintain and update my code. I think of these poor souls (you know who you are) when I'm setting up a solution and designing a new system.

One of the simplest things I do is organize my code so that resides in an intuitive folder structure. First I create a Solutions directory, then I add each project under the solution's folder. That is until I try to add a Web Project. By default, the web project is added to the home directory of the Default Web Site in IIS, generally C:\inetpub\wwwroot\. I try to “trick“ VS.NET by creating a virtual directory and pointing it at my project directory, then hack my .webinfo file to get everything to work correctly, but this seems to cause Source Safe to complain when another developer tries to get latest.

\Solution.One
      \src
           \Solution.Project1
           \Solution.Project2
           \Solution.Project3
           \Solution.WebUI

The other issue I have with web projects it compiles all the files into one assembly for the entire website. The websites that I develop have multiple teams working on different sections of a website, with each team having it's own release schedule. How does the “admin“ section team release its changes to production, but not release the updated code for the “news“ section team? If they are both working under the same web project the simple answer is, “they don't“. When the project compiles all the code is compiled into one assembly.

Solution (er...Hack)
But then I started to think, how is a web project different than a class library project? Besides specific file types for web development (.aspx, ascx, asmx) and a virutal directory,  they are the same. Even the project type of a web project property says “class library“. Hmmm....

What would happen if I created a class library project, pointed a virtual directory at it, added a web.config file and a .aspx page? Well, it works just like a normal web project. This solved my problem. Each section (folder) of the web project would be in its own class library. I would point the output directory for all the projects to the same \bin directory at the “root“ of my web application. Everything will work this way. The next problem I ran into was that the class library projects don't have the ASP.NET file types in the “Add New Item...“ dialog box, but I found this article that explains how to fix that problem.

The good news is that all of my issues with the web project goes away with VS 2005. Each web page compiles into it's own assembly. However with VS2005, I have some other issues that hopefully I will blog about later...