After upgrading from Visual Studio 2003 to 2005 there is one feature that I totally hate in VS2005. That is the lack of project files for Web projects.
I simply cannot get why Microsoft decided to remove web projects and go for the “all or nothing” approach of a file based project.
When working in a larger project consisting of several developers one often got source code “conflicts” on the old VS2003 project files. The clue was to checkout only when needed, do your changes and quickly check back in.
Though that was not ideal it worked. Now in a large project everything is chaos. Especially references. We consistently use “project” references instead of binary references when developing. But since there is no project file VS2005 stores the information in the .SOU file accompanying the solution file. This file is normally not checked in since it’s user dependent.
To make a long story short, we have spent quite a lot of hours on Visual Source Safe and web projects/reference problems.
But there might be hope soon as the Web Application Project is now in beta 2. This add-on promises VS2003 like projects files for web projects also in VS2005.
I can’t wait…