Web Application VS Web Site in Visual Studio

This article describes what is the difference between Web Application and Web Site in Visual Studio?

In Visual Studio we can create Web Application projects or Web Site projects by choosing New Project or New Web Site. Each type of project has advantages and disadvantages. It is much necessary to select the appropriate project type. Because, it is not practical to convert one project type to the other.

Web Application VS Web Site
The difference between web application and web site is given bellow:
Web Application

1. It creates a Visual Studio project file (.csproj or .vbproj) that store the information of all the files in a project.
2. Every page has .aspx, .aspx.cs, .aspx.designer.cs files.
3. We can create MVC application.
4. We cannot edit individual files after deployment without recompiling.
5. Creates pre-compiled pages.
6. If we make a single change in one page we need to re-compile the entire sites. We need to deploy the entire sites.
7. It does not support multi programming languages.
8. All the files are compiled into a single assembly file.

Web Site

1. It does not create any Visual Studio project file (.csproj or .vbproj). All the files in a project stay in folder structure.
2. Every page has .aspx, .aspx.cs files.
3. We cannot create MVC application.
4. We can creates code behind pages that are compiled when page is requested.
5. If we make any change we don’t need to re-compile entire sites. We need not to deploy the entire sites. We will only upload the changes pages.
6. It supports multi programming languages.

That’s all about web site vs web application in asp.net