Html – How to embed an ASP.NET Web Site (or Web Application) into another

asp.nethtml-framesvisual-studio-2008

I have very little experience with ASP.NET and I am doing some self-training before I start writing my first web site/application, which will be a calibration utility. How that utility works is not my concern right now. However, the utility eventually needs to end up embedded in someone else's web site, either just as a URL to the page with my code, or embedded (say, as an HTML frame or an iframe). To figure out the basics of this, I coded up two very simple ASP.NET web sites, a "parent" which contains the frameset, and a "child" which I am trying to put into one of the frames.

The parent's "Default.aspx" HTML code is basically this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title>Parent Site Test 1</title>
</head>

<frameset cols="300,*">
    <frame name="outer" src="parent.aspx" noresize></frame>
    <frame name="inner" src="[what do I put here?]"</frame>
</frameset>

</html>

The "parent.aspx" page has only the most basic HTML in it:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        I am the parent web form.
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

The child web site (as I have it now) lives in a separate VS2008 solution, for the purposes of this exercise, because I am trying to reproduce the conditions in which someone else's web site has to reference my calibration web page/site/thing. I was originally thinking there would be some way to package the entire child into a single DLL, and then there would be some way to tell the parent to use that DLL as the source for the child frame. This comes from my experience in the Java world – using JBoss and J2EE, this would be easily solved because the child would just be deployed as another EAR file.

Being completely inexperienced with VS2008 and ASP.NET, I spent quite a few hours on Google over the past few days trying to find an answer, to no avail.

Is what I'm trying to do reasonable; is it the right way to think about solving the problem?
Can I deploy the child as a fairly independent and self-contained web site (or web application… I'm still unclear on the differences) by somehow packaging it into a single DLL? If yes, then how do I actually create this DLL from my web site/application in VS2008, and how do I then reference it in the parent web site?
If I am totally off track here, how can I create this parent/child combination in some other way? The child (really, the calibration utility I will eventually write) does need to be in ASP.NET (with C#) but I don't have any control over the parent site, since it's someone else's code, and they just want to be able to drop in my utility.

Thanks for the help! The more specific you can be, the better. I am very new to ASP.NET and Visual Studio, though I do have plenty of experience programming in other languages and IDEs.

Best Answer

If you know the client also uses ASP.Net, you could build it as a User Control.

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common

.net – ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application

Website:

The Web Site project is compiled on the fly. You end up with a lot more DLL files, which can be a pain. It also gives problems when you have pages or controls in one directory that need to reference pages and controls in another directory since the other directory may not be compiled into the code yet. Another problem can be in publishing.

If Visual Studio isn't told to re-use the same names constantly, it will come up with new names for the DLL files generated by pages all the time. That can lead to having several close copies of DLL files containing the same class name, which will generate plenty of errors. The Web Site project was introduced with Visual Studio 2005, but it has turned out not to be popular.

Web Application:

The Web Application Project was created as an add-in and now exists as part of SP 1 for Visual Studio 2005. The main differences are the Web Application Project was designed to work similarly to the Web projects that shipped with Visual Studio 2003. It will compile the application into a single DLL file at build time. To update the project, it must be recompiled and the DLL file published for changes to occur.

Another nice feature of the Web Application project is it's much easier to exclude files from the project view. In the Web Site project, each file that you exclude is renamed with an excluded keyword in the filename. In the Web Application Project, the project just keeps track of which files to include/exclude from the project view without renaming them, making things much tidier.

Reference

The article ASP.NET 2.0 - Web Site vs Web Application project also gives reasons on why to use one and not the other. Here is an excerpt of it:

You need to migrate large Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to VS 2005? use the Web Application project.

You want to open and edit any directory as a Web project without creating a project file? use Web Site project.

You need to add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation? use Web Application project.

You need to build a Web application using multiple Web projects? use the Web Application project.

You want to generate one assembly for each page? use the Web Site project.

You prefer dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view? use Web Site project.

You prefer single-page code model to code-behind model? use Web Site project.

Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects (MSDN) explains the differences between the web site and web application projects. Also, it discusses the configuration to be made in Visual Studio.