Web Application Structure and Deployment

Question

Our product is an ASP.Net web application. Currently, we use Web Site Projects in Visual Studio, but have been looking into using Web Application Projects for quite some time. I am currently researching them so that we can hopefully improve our deployment process.

We have a base web site that is shared and common between different clients, and then we extend that with client-specific functionality in client Web Site Projects. The client projects extend base, and therefore rely on its contents. To build the full product, we first deploy the base web site, and then overlay it with the content from the client project.

In looking at converting to Web Application Projects in Visual Studio, we were hoping to be able to create the base project, then create client projects and set up references to base. This structure seems to work OK, but when we are attempting to deploy the application from the client project using MSDeploy, only the dll from the base web site is being published. This is fine for some things, referencing the compiled code is useful, but there are other items like images, js pages, htm, etc that is still source that is required for the client application to function. We need more than the compiled code from our base web site.

That all being said, I can think of a few options here:

1. Continue to deploy in 2 steps. First the base web site, then the client web site to build the full product.
2. Modify the deployment process to copy the required source files from the base project
3. Re-architect our model to support this base-client relationship in a different manner. Not quite sure how this would work, and would be the least-viable option.
4. ??

Is there a different option that I am missing? Am I doing something wrong with the way I am setting up my projects? Is there more to making a Web Application reference another Web Application beyond sharing compiled code? If that's the case, why wouldn't you just use a shared class library? Or maybe I am missing something with the MS Deploy process?

I am open to suggestions here as I feel like I am missing something. I don't think our model for our web applications is too unique.

Update: The dual-deploy process does work, but feels a little kludgey. Any other input?

Answer 1

By using assembly WebResource you can Add CSS/JS/Some other File as Reference along with the Code i.e, your Base Project DLL.

If am right you can Add this WebResource in your base project then go through the below link.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910442

Like this way, most of the third party tools will access their CSS and JS files.

Try this. Hope it will help.