Before we begin, we need a Visual Studio Project for Intranet Portal

As promised, it’s time to start looking under the hood of Sitecore Intranet Portal 3.1. There is so much for us to discuss! How exciting!

But before we do, as developers, we need to create a Visual Studio 2008 web application project. As introduced with Visual Studio 2005 sp1, there are some key differences between the Web site project and the Web Application project model.

The Web site project model uses the directory structure to define the contents of the project. In this model, there is no project file, and all files in the directory are part of the project. In the Web application project model, only files that are explicitly referenced in the solution's project file are part of the project. These files are displayed in Solution Explorer. These files are compiled during a build. That's a big difference.  For many developers, we choose the Web application project model because we want to do the following:

• Use stand-alone classes to reference page classes and more often, user-control classes
• Have control over the names of output assemblies
• Add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation
• Build a Web application with multiple Web projects
• Publish the Web Application project into a single assembly

Sitecore CMS supports the Web Application Project model, and not the Web site model.

Today’s post features a short video on how to create a visual studio project for Sitecore Intranet Portal 3.1.

While you do the watching, I’ll continue writing the course outline draft due at the end of the week.



A quick recap:

1. Create a "Dummy" web application project
2. Copy the Properties Folder, Project File and User Options file to your SIP website folder
3. Open the copied project file in Visual Studio
4. Exclude Default.aspx
5. Add a reference to the Sitecore.Kernel. Set Copy Local to False
6. Include any other folder or file in the project
7. Build and test

Questions or comments? Please post. Thanks!

Next topic: Adding the Sitecore Intranet Portal source files to your project.