Edit and continue in ASP.NET web projects

Question

I know how to enable Edit and Continue in ASP.NET Web Application projects (see here), however, I found no information as to how to achieve the same thing in ASP.NET Web Site projects.

Is this feature available in Web Site projects? If no, it seems that converting our Web Site project to a Web Application is really worth doing.

Answer 1

With a website project edit and continue is disabled by default. To enable it you must go to: Properties->Web->'Servers' section, check 'Enable Edit and Continue'. Then, if you break your code you can edit it and continue. You cannot edit the code if you are not stepping through it. i.e. you have to break before editing.

Answer 2

Although you can't edit the code while stepping through with the debugger, Web Site projects allow you to simply edit the source code and then reload the page. This is almost as useful as "Edit and Continue." ASP.NET dynamic compilation allows you to change the source code which triggers the automatic recompile.

Here is a related article on Understanding ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

This page is also useful and has a section called Comparing Web Site Projects and Web Application Projects