File -> Open Website in MonoDevelop?

Question

I cannot open an existing website in MonoDevelop. I have tried various options with no success. Is there any way to do this?

Visual Studio has this and it works very well, but I'd like to try out MonoDevelop for my current project.

Answer 1

MonoDevelop supports Visual Studio's Web Application Projects but not Web Sites.

• Web Application projects are real MSBuild projects, compiling to a dll. This means you can write unit tests, have more control over the project structure, can catch more errors at compile time before deploying, and so on.

• Web Sites are simply directories. Settings are stored in web.config, all compilation happens on the server. This means you can edit sites directly on the server (though I personally think this is bad practice).

There are many explanations on the net - here's one that seems good, though like me it's biased towards web application projects...