Iron Speed Designer (ISD) has historically created web sites, up until version 7.0 was released last May, which added the option of creating web applications for .NET or for Microsoft SharePoint.

When we first started developing web applications, we ran across a few issues during deployment of applications with integrated SQL Server Reporting Services, which we quickly overcame. After developing several ISD web site and web application projects for the past year, we prefer web applications (ideally written in C#) when starting new client projects.

The main structural difference between the web sites vs. web applications is web apps consist of three projects, the data access layer, the business layer, and the front-end website with the website referencing the other two projects, whereas web sites have a single directory which contains all code for the web pages as well as a App_Code directory which contains the code-behind and the business and data access layers.

The main reason we prefer web applications is because the data access and business layer projects are separate to the main web component, which means they can be referenced by other solutions, so all data access and validation is performed in a single place. For example, we have developed an IT Support web application in ISD v7.1.1 and an associated WCF web service which use the shared data access and business layer projects. Web apps also have shorter build times in Visual Studio, which is not a major point, but when building large applications, it definitely makes a difference!

The main disadvantage of web apps for us is the project’s source code cannot be obtained once deployed to the production server as the data access and business layer code is compiled to DLLs in the bin directory, which means changes cannot be made on the production site once deployed, although we rarely have a need to do this.