Reference app_code classes in web application project

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.

(Updated for completeness)
You can access session variables from any page or control using Session["loginId"] and from any class (e.g. from inside a class library), using System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["loginId"].

But please read on for my original answer...

I always use a wrapper class around the ASP.NET session to simplify access to session variables:

public class MySession
{
    // private constructor
    private MySession()
    {
      Property1 = "default value";
    }

    // Gets the current session.
    public static MySession Current
    {
      get
      {
        MySession session =
          (MySession)HttpContext.Current.Session["__MySession__"];
        if (session == null)
        {
          session = new MySession();
          HttpContext.Current.Session["__MySession__"] = session;
        }
        return session;
      }
    }

    // **** add your session properties here, e.g like this:
    public string Property1 { get; set; }
    public DateTime MyDate { get; set; }
    public int LoginId { get; set; }
}

This class stores one instance of itself in the ASP.NET session and allows you to access your session properties in a type-safe way from any class, e.g like this:

int loginId = MySession.Current.LoginId;

string property1 = MySession.Current.Property1;
MySession.Current.Property1 = newValue;

DateTime myDate = MySession.Current.MyDate;
MySession.Current.MyDate = DateTime.Now;

This approach has several advantages:

• it saves you from a lot of type-casting
• you don't have to use hard-coded session keys throughout your application (e.g. Session["loginId"]
• you can document your session items by adding XML doc comments on the properties of MySession
• you can initialize your session variables with default values (e.g. assuring they are not null)