Visual Studio 2003 vs. Visual Studio 2005

Question

I am personally only familiar with VS 2005 and am working on a project using VS 2003. So I've downloaded the solution to my local drive, opened it and had to fiddle with IIS a bit before it would run and now I also have the website in the inetpub folder.

Can someone just explain using an overall picture what's going on. Am I editing the file in my local source safe folder and when I run the app the sites is copied it the IIS folder?

How do I publish the site, Normally I right click the solution, goto publish and fill out the form. In 1.1 should I just copy the content from my source safe folder to it's destination or copy them out of my IIS folder to the destination or secret option number 3?

Thanks guys

Answer 1

In VS2005 you have integrated Web Server, so your web app can be run from any directory on the disk - ie. from your source directory. In VS2003 you can only use IIS, so you have to copy source to IIS folder. Yes, there are tricks to simplify web development in VS2003, but still the comfort of VSA2005 is much, much greater.

Answer 2

When I developed with vs.net 03, I pointed the IIS site to the same directory to where I had pulled it out of source control, so I dont have to bother copying it over whenever I do any changes, and that seemed to work perfectly well

When publishing the site, you want to copy all the files over, bar the following extensions:

.cs
.resx
.csproj
.projdata
.sln
.csproj.user
.suo
.scc
.load
.vssscc
.vspscc

Dont forget to copy over the bin directory!

Answer 3

VS 2003 only has the "Web application" project type, not "Websites" that are available in VS 2005. Additionally, the File system website model is lacking in VS 2003.

VS 2003 requires a web application to be a configured virtual folder in IIS. It does not need to be copied to Inetpub\wwwroot folder, but it does need to be a virtual directory. So you do not need to copy the files to the IIS folder.

Lastly, VS 2003 does not have a "Publish" site option because when you build the website, all files are compiled into a single assembly. This is in contrast with the VS 2005 website model where each resource is compiled into a separate assembly allowing for dynamic compilation.