Is my Visual Studio project a web application or a web site?

Question

First of all, when to use what and the overall differences between them has already been answered before. But I couldn\'t find an answer to this question:

Answer 1

The easiest way to differentiate between Web Site and Web Application is to look at the project's icons.

Web Site

• has an icon without the used language
• displays its physical root path
• does not have a Properties folder

Web Application

• has an icon including the used language
• displays the project's name
• has a Properties folder

To find out more about the technical differences between them ...

ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application?

Answer 2

Personally, one tell tale sign for me is whether the project folder actually contains a project file, or not.

You can see the icons differ slightly in VS - a web application has a layered world->docs->language icon and a web site just consists of world->docs.

Also, once opened within VS, right-clicking will display Properties and Property Pages for web applications and web sites respectively; further, on clicking this option you will be greeted with a dialog for the former and MDI tabbed form for the latter - the latter also exposes more functionality to control pre and post build steps and so forth.

A a web application will also display Properties and References special folders as part of the project tree in the Solution Explorer, whereas a web site does not necessarily; unless manually created for some reason (but they still won't be special - web sites use the bin folder for their references).

Answer 3

I recently found out (painfully) that web applications do not support Profiles which is not fun. Web sites however do support them and make life much easier. I noticed here people saying there are no major differences. This one is quite major and can make your life difficult if you select to make a web application instead of a web site.

Answer 4

Web application and Web Site are VS templates, nothing more. I doubt you will find this information directly somewhere in project. You can try to go through template differences list and guess how this particular project was created.

Answer 5

For Web Site project, once run (F5) you can change the code in the code-behind, the solution will allow it and it will compile on the fly when saved.

A Web Application project, however, will not allow this. This is the simplest way of being able to tell between the two.