Asp – Using ASP.NET usercontrols for templating without having a Website project

Well I think I've done it ... by being mindful of a few of a few annoying pitfalls with my last approach, I recommend the following when compiling ASCX user controls in a Web Application Project using a Web Deployment Project:

1. Avoid putting classes in App_Code unless they're standalone or helper classes, ASP.NET treats this as a speshul folder, the meaning of which is lost on me, mayhem, confusion and chaos follows. Code in this folder does get output in the Web Deployment Project, though.
   • Pay close attention to your assembly names, their root namespaces and deployment output assembly name- you'll get access is denied errors if you have any naming conflicts during the aspnet_merge process.
   • Ultimately you'll most likely end up deploying 2 assemblies, I tried to create only one but the deployment output was still pointing to type definitions in the source assembly. This isn't a problem if you don't have any other types in your Web Application Project--I have so it was a problem for me. In my case, my final output was:
   • <Organisation>.<TechnologyName>.Web.DLL - Compiled Web Application Assembly (containing the ASCX templates)
   • <Organisation>.<TechnologyName>.Web.UI.DLL - ASP.NET Compiled UserControl assembly, created by Web Deployment Project
   • Clean often, and check that the Web Application Project's bin and obj paths are cleared of any previous junk built when you perhaps hadn't finalised your namespace or assembly naming scheme--the Web Deployment Project will be quite keen to include these, causing a fine mess.
   • Check your imported namespaces, the ASP.NET compiler likes to refer to the Import directive in the ASCX template, and it also considers imported namespaces present in web.config's <configuration><system.web><pages><namespaces> element, tweak if you get unknown definitions appearing during the deployment process.

Have some patience spare, it's quite tricky! But you do get some nice re distributable UserControls at the end of it!

Phew!

You can use the ServiceHost class to host a service. The WCF tutorial contains sample code.