Uh oh, gratuitous use of quotes. What led me to do such a thing? Well first, I am annoyed with many changes in ASP.Net 2.0.

The first being one that has been discussed and discussed again, so I won't rehash much here except to say that I do not like the file based approach to the "projects" without having a project file. Everything, including everything in a child folder, from your projects parent folder down is include in the project. If it is a source file, it will be compiled. The previous functionality of removing a file from a project is gone. If you have thousands of images for your asset management app somewhere in your folder hierarchy, they will all be in the project.

Second, adding a reference to a library dll does not really add a reference. The process just copies the dll to the local bin folder, with no actual reference to it. What this means for me is that it suddenly becomes a pain to develop in two instances of Visual Studio. I have a framework of controls and other classes that I am building up as I am building a couple different apps. In one instance is my framework solution where I will add new controls I need that I think may come in handy again. The other is the current app/web app I am working on.

The normal process would be to add the controls to the framework solution, build, run tests, etc. Then I would rebuild the web app solution, picking up the changes to the framework dlls. I could then use the new classes and controls in the web app solution. This all worked perfectly and actually helped me write decoupled, reusable objects.

Now that the references are not really references, I have to manually re-add the "references" to the dlls.

All this is thanks to the absence of an actual website.csproj file to keep track of things. There is no way to tell the project not to include your thousand images and it has no idea where your library dlls came from.

There are a number of great improvements to ASP.Net. I feel, however, that these two things, along with the weird stuff the team is doing with the component designer may mar many user's impression of it.

I am all for a file based approach to web projects, but why does that require the absence of a project file? What else does this impact? I was having trouble discovering how I could set different build configurations for a web project. That too was kept in the project file in the past. Maybe it is there and I just need to keep looking.