VS 2005: Application Architecture

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 contains lots of great new features that enable developers to work and increase their productivity by leaps and bounds. In this series we shall discuss a lot of these new features of Visual Studio when used on building ASP.NET 2.0 applications.

Built-In Web Server: For the longest time I could remember, Internet Information Server (IIS) is married to ASP, as such any application requires a virtual directory mapped in IIS.

Visual Studio 2005 now includes a built-in web server that gives you the option to choose between running an application with it's virtual directory mapped in IIS or build a stand-alone application running the file directly from default C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\My Documents\ Visual Studio 2005\WebSites although you may choose the path for your files. I made numerous mistakes during my initial days developing web applications where I would always force .NET to save my project in the folder I wanted, instead of the tool's required C:\Inetpub\wwwroot path.

During development phase, your application is running your local IIS; however, when the application is invoked it shall run using IIS outside of Visual Studio which make the URL the same with the previous version of ASP -- http://localhost/web/default.aspx.

Another cool feature of Visual Studio is being able to save your project in another web server using FTP access. With this feature, I would no longer miss my development days using Macromedia which offered the same capability.

Had enough? Microsoft included Front Page extension capabilities when connecting to remote servers which give developers additional choices.

Application Code: We are now seeing more Macromedia features present in Visual Studio 2005 in the inclusion of compile ready files dumped in folders. Microsoft has included a built-in folder named "App_Code" where classes, typed datasets and .wsdl are stored and automatically creates an XML Web Service Proxy from .wsdl files and typed datasets from .xsd files. What is so amazing is whenever we placed codes or classes inside this folder, compilation happens instantaneously that gives as intellisense for these classes upon coding without the need of a project based compilation.

Application Data: "App_Data" folder is the central repository for storing all database files like Ms Access, XML Files, etc. and can be accessed with read/write privileges using the default account --ASPNET. This works with ASP's membership and ASP.NET MMC snap-in and site administration tool which gives developers added flexibility.

Application Themes: "App_Themes" as the name implies is where you place your themes, skins and css files for standard web design throughout all the pages of your application.

Application Resources: "App_GlobalResources" stores resources such as images, .resx files for cultural extensibility and multilingual capabilities which the browser automatically retrieves depending on the client settings.

All these changes are expected to increase developers' productivity with ease of use and speed of certain tasks such as compilation and organization of files. With a new and improved ASP.NET 2.0 feature set combined with the power of Visual Studio 2005, I see no reason why companies and developers would not go this path.

[tags]Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, ASP.NET 2.0[/tags]

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