Web Application Projects RC1 is availible!!!!

For the past few months, I've been primarily working on a new feature called Web Application Projects.  This was incredibly challenging and took way more of my time than I realized it would but it also quite exciting to work on.  So, I'm incredibly happy to finally announce that it is availible for download on msdn. 

Web Application Projects is a feature we started working on immediately after we finished shipping Visual Studio 2005.  While the "website model" is great for new projects, there were a lot of challenges for migrating Visual Studio 2003 web projects to VS05.  We also lost a few features between 03 and 05 such as being able to add class files where the logically fit in the site (ie in parallel with pages that depended on them).  We solved these problems by creating this plug-in.  It, in many ways, brings back the VS03 web project model into VS05.  Existing VS03 users should find it quite easy to pick up.

Rather than just wait for SP1 to be put together and including it there, we decided to make "WAPs" availible early as a "speedboat" or plugin for Visual Studio 2005. In the next few posts, I'll try and address some of the differences between websites and web apps.  But for now, here's a few links:

You can download it here:  https://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wap/default.aspx
You will need to patch Visual Studio in order to install WAPs, all the details are on the site.

There's a forum dedicated to WAPs here: https://forums.asp.net/1019/ShowForum.aspx

Scott Guthrie also has a lot of information about WAPs on his blog and website:
https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/05/442032.aspx
https://webproject.scottgu.com/
https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/16/433374.aspx
https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/27/441147.aspx
https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/02/05/437439.aspx