Microsoft has provided two new project enhancements for working with ASP.NET in Visual Studio 2005: Web App projects and Deployment projects.
From msdn:
The Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects model uses the same project, build and compilation semantics as the Visual Studio 2003 web project model. Specifically:
- All files contained within the project are defined within a project file (as well as the assembly references and other project meta-data settings). Files under the web's file-system root that are not defined in the project file are not logically considered part of the web project.
- All code files within the project are compiled into a single assembly (that gets built and persisted in the \bin directory on each compile).
- The compilation system uses a standard MSBuild based compilation process. This can be extended and customized using standard MSBuild extensibility rules. You can therefore control the build through the property pages, so for example, you can name the output assembly.
Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects are there to enhance the deployment of your web applications. The add-in includes a new tool that enables you to merge the assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation, and it provides a comprehensive UI within Visual Studio 2005 for managing build configurations, merging, and pre-build and post-build task using MSBuild.