My organization has decided to migrate an existing Web Site Application (WSP) to a Web Application Project (WAP). This is a quick post to share the decision-making process highlights and to consolidate some of the references we consulted.
I found an MSDN article Introduction to Web Application Projects that gave a nice WAP overview with a simple decision matrix for choosing between WSP and WAP.
I found these blog posts to be particularly helpful on how to make a decision, especially Vishal Joshi’s thorough and knowledgeable comparison:
- http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2009/08/web-application-project-vs-web-site.html
- http://www.compiledthoughts.com/2008/05/web-site-vs-web-application-project.html
- http://www.codersbarn.com/post/2008/06/ASPNET-Web-Site-versus-Web-Application-Project.aspx
- http://aspnetresources.com/blog/web_site_vs_web_application_project_wap.aspx
My broad impression after reading these various resources is that the WSP is best suited for demo or small web sites, or if there is a strong case for granular deployment (e.g., deploy an individual web page). WAP is the clear favorite for enterprise production web sites.
Our decision to switch to WAP came down to these four key factors that favor WAP:
- Better support for unit testing
- Better support for continuous integration
- Upcoming Web Deployment features (VS 2010) only support WAP
- Better control over application development (e.g., Namespace control)
Conversion assistance from WSP to WAP is available as an online tutorial and as an MSDN article.
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