Strategies for Hosting 2 .NET Languages in Same Web App

Question

I have 2 web sites (in Visual Studio - separate solutions) - one in VB.NET, one in C#. Ideally, I'd like to make them both web application projects, compile each codebase into to a DLL, drop both DLLs in the bin and drop both sets of .aspx pages under web root folder. So some aspx files would have Language="C#" and some Language="VB.NET", and in the bin you'd have /bin/MyVB6.dll, /bin/MyCSharp.dll. The .aspx pages could be broken up into separate sub-directories. Is this even possible? - Or would they need to be separate virtual directories/web apps in IIS?

Thanks

Answer 1

I see no reason why you can't do that (you can even have one assembly with the help of MSBUild and ILMerge). In a web application the language declaration does not matter and the classes are loaded from the pre-compiled dlls. In a web project each page is compiled at runtime in its own assembly. However you may need to hack your Visual Studio's project files to build the source code in case of web application. To stay safe I suggest you move your code to user controls in separate class library projects.