Creating A Blank ASP.NET Project

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 gives you a few options to create an ASP.NET website pre-loaded with a bunch of websites already built for you. This is great if you just want something to play around with something, but don't do you much good if you don't know whats going on.

For this reason, the remainder of the ASP.NET posts, unless otherwise noted will be using blank ASP.NET website projects.

To create a blank ASP.NET website project, open Microsoft Visual Studio and follow these steps:

1. Click the "File" menu option on the main menu
2. Click the "New" sub-menu option
3. Click the "Web Site..."

After you click the menu option in Step 3 , the following dialog will appear (Note: I'm using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional):

On the dialog box, you will see something titled "Web location" and you should have the following options:

The "New Web Site" dialog.

• File System
• This creates a website on your local file system. Such as C:\Websites. These website are not available to the actual Internet via IIS or other server technologies, unless you create a virtual directory pointing to them. 
• HTTP
• These are IIS websites located on the local computer, or a remote computer.
• FTP
• These are websites that you connect to with FTP. You will need to provide credentials to access the FTP server.

More information on ASP.NET web locations can be found here.

When selecting the project template, choose "ASP.NET Empty Web Site". This will create a blank ASP.NET project where you can add your own web site components.

Microsoft has an example project that you can play around with if you choose "ASP.NET Web Site"