Expert: Ashley Brazier - 10/14/2009

Question
Greetings,

I have recently downloaded and installed Microsoft Web Developer 2008 Express (along with their Visual Basic 2008 Express).  I created my first web page called FirstWebPage.aspx.  From the menu, I clicked on ‘New Web Site’ and chose ‘ASP.NET web site’ from the dialog box.  The Location that I used was ‘File System’ and the Language was ‘Visual Basic’.  When I press CTRL+F5, it runs without errors and it looks great.  However, I do have a few questions:  How do I make the window (when I press CTRL+F5) run maximized?  What is the difference between ‘New Web Site’ and ‘New Project’ from the ‘File’ menu?  How can I make an icon on my desktop to access the web site without loading the Visual Web Developer program?  The file location is on the company shared drive, can fellow employees access the site from an icon on their desktop?  What is Deploy and what is Plublish?

Thank You,
Jimmy

Answer
Hi,

I'm not really an expert in this area but I will try and help.

What is the difference between ‘New Web Site’ and ‘New Project’ from the ‘File’ menu?

A. Supposing you choose new project and then web application in this option, the below link will tell you the differance between web application and website:-
http://www.dotnetspider.com/resources/1520-Difference-between-web-site-web-appli...

How can I make an icon on my desktop to access the web site without loading the Visual Web Developer program?

A. If you create a website or web application this will need to sit on a server which has IIS and ASP.NET 3.5 installed, you won't be able to run it from a shared area. Once you have set this up you can create a shortcut to this websiite web application so everyone can access it.

What is Deploy and what is Plublish?

A.You will get a precompiled site by publishing as well as by creating a setup.exe (setup and deployment)

The difference between the two is that:

Publishing: you right click on the website and click on 'Publish Web Site'. Here you can specify a folder where the precompiled website will be published. Then you can ftp the website. Other option is you can directly specify the ftp location.

Setup and Deployment: you create a new setup and deployment project, add the project output and finally create a setup.exe file. You need to login into the server on which you want to install the application. There you need to run the setup.exe file.

So, if you are hosting your application on a shared hosting environment, you should use publishing. And if you are creating a web application product to be downloaded from your  website, you should ideally create a setup.exe (deploy).

http://forums.asp.net/t/1058897.aspx

Hope this helps.
Thanks