Tutorial 1: Building First Web Application Project

The below tutorial walks-through how to create, build and run your first web app using C# and the ASP.NET Web Application Project support in VS 2005.

Creating a New Project

Select File->New Project within the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. This will bring up the New Project dialog. Click on the “Visual C#” node in the tree-view on the left hand side of the dialog box and choose the "ASP.NET Web Application" icon:

Choose where you want the project to be created on disk (note that there is no longer a requirement for web projects to be created underneath the inetpub\wwwroot directory -- so you can store the project anywhere on your filesystem). Then name it and hit ok.

Customizing Project Properties

ASP.NET Web Application Projects share the same configuration settings and behaviors as standard VS 2005 class library projects. You access these configuration settings by right-clicking on the project node within the Solution Explorer in VS 2005 and selecting the "Properties" context-menu item. This will then bring up the project properties configuration editor. You can use this to change the name of the generated assembly, the build compilation settings of the project, its references, its resource string values, code-signing settings, etc:

ASP.NET Web Application Projects also add a new tab called "Web" to the project properties list. Developers use this tab to configure how a web project is run and debugged. By default, ASP.NET Web Application Projects are configured to launch and run using the built-in VS Web Server (aka Cassini) on a random HTTP port on the machine.

This port number can be changed if this port is already in use, or if you want to specifically test and run using a different number:

Alternatively, Visual Studio can connect and debug IIS when running the web application. To use IIS instead, select the "Use IIS Web Server" option and enter the url of the application to launch, connect-to, and use when F5 or Control-F5 is selected:

Then configure the url to this application in the above property page for the web project. When you hit F5 in the project, Visual Studio will then launch a browser to that web application and automatically attach a debugger to the web-server process to enable you to debug it.

Note that ASP.NET Web Application Projects can also create the IIS vroot and configure the application for you. To do this click the "Create Virtual Directory" button.