VS 2005, Web Site Project/Web Application Project

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730880(VS.80).aspx

The Web Application Projects add-in provides a Visual Studio 2005 Web project model option that works like the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web project model. In this paper, the new project type is referred to as a Web application project. You can use Web application projects as an alternative to the Web site project model already available in Visual Studio 2005, which we refer to in this paper as Web site projects.

Purpose of Web Application Projects
The goal of Web application projects is to address some of the feedback we have heard from customers. Some developers find migrating Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to the new Web site model in Visual Studio 2005 impractical, especially because precompiling (publishing) a Visual Studio 2005 Web site creates multiple assemblies.

The new Web application project type also enables some scenarios where Visual Studio 2005 Web projects are different than in the previous version of Visual Studio. For example, the new model has different semantics for Web subprojects where the subproject is not an ASP.NET or IIS application, but instead feeds its generated assembly to a parent application's Bin folder.

The new project type also provides a model that will feel familiar to developers who do not want to change how they structure their Web projects from how they use Visual Studio .NET 2003 today—for example, they want to continue to use a project file.

The new Web application project type does not replace the Web site project type introduced in Visual Studio 2005, which provides many new features and additional flexibility in how you manage Web applications. Instead, it is an alternative project type that you might choose depending on your requirements and your preferred development workflow. Some developers will find the default Visual Studio 2005 Web site project model natural and easy to use. Other developers will prefer a model in which project resources are defined explicitly (rather than implicitly by simply being in a folder) and in which they have tighter control over their project, and will therefore choose the new Web application project model. Rather than forcing developers to use just one project model, we will support both project models and allow developers to choose whichever Web project model works best for them.