In Visual Studio . What's the difference between Web Site Project and Web Application Project?

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Area

Web application projects

Web site projects

Project file structure

A Visual Studio project file (.csproj or .vbproj) stores information about the project, such as the list of files that are included in the project, and any project-to-project references.

There is no project file (.csproj or .vbproj). All the files in a folder structure are automatically included in the site.

Compilation

• You explicitly compile the source code on the computer that is used for development or source control.

• By default, compilation of code files (excluding .aspx and .ascx files) produces a single assembly.

• The source code is typically compiled dynamically (automatically) by ASP.NET on the server the first time a request is received after the site has been installed or updated.

  You can precompile the site (compile in advance on a development computer or on the server).

• By default, compilation produces multiple assemblies.

Namespaces

Explicit namespaces are added to pages, controls, and classes by default.

Explicit namespaces are not added to pages, controls, and classes by default, but you can add them manually.

Deployment

• You copy the assembly to a server. The assembly is produced by compiling the application.

• Visual Studio provides tools that integrate with Web Deploy (the IIS web deployment tool) to automate many deployment tasks.

• You copy the application source files to a computer that has IIS installed on it.

• If you precompile the site on a development computer, you copy the assemblies produced by compilation to the IIS server.

• Visual Studio provides tools that integrate with Web Deploy (the IIS web deployment tool) to automate many deployment tasks.

Web Application Has one assembly file ,Web Site has more than one assembly file

We cannot prgramming the Web application with diffrent language in the same project but in Web Site we can

Web Application has a project file,but Web Site has not

The source code of Web Application Compile on Computer Developer but the one of Web Site Compile on the server

It highlights the differences between web app and web site projects such as:

• Web app projects store info about a project into a project file. Web site projects do not have a project file.
• Web app projects compiles a single assembly. Web site projects compile multiple assemblies (by default).
• Namespaces are added to pages, classes, and controls by default in web apps. This is not the case for web sites, although you can add namespaces to pages, classes, and manually.
• "Visual Studio provides tools for [web site project] deployment, but they do not automate as many deployment tasks as the tools available for Web application projects."

This is totally personal and subjective, but I'd say that a website is defined by its content, while a webapplication is defined by its interaction with the user. That is, a website can plausibly consist of a static content repository that's dealt out to all visitors, while a web application depends on interaction and requires programmatic user input and data processing.

For example, a news site would be a "website", but a spreadsheet or a collaborative calendar would be web "applications". The news site shows essentially the same information to all visitors, while the calendar processes individual data.

Practically, most websites with quickly changing content will also rely on a sophisticated programmatic (and/or database) backend, but at least in principle they're only defined by their output. The web application on the other hand is essentially a program that runs remotely, and it depends fundamentally on a processing and a data storage backend.

In Visual Studio you can create web application projects or web site projects. You create or open a web application project by choosing New Project orOpen Project in the Visual Studio File menu. You create or open a web site project by choosing New Web Site or Open Web Site in the File menu. It’s best to choose the right type before you create a web project, because it can be time-consuming, difficult, and error-prone to convert from one type to the other.

difference au niveau de la structure de projet et au niveau de la compilation