Thursday, July 2, 2015

Regenerate Designer files for ASP.NET Web Applications

If you have recently worked with Visual Studio 2013 or Visual Studio 2015, you may have noticed that they have removed the "Convert to Web Application" feature that was previously available in earlier versions of Visual Studio.

This feature essentially allowed files that were copied or imported from an ASP.NET Web Site to be converted into an ASP.NET Web Application by regenerating the necessary .designer files needed in ASP.NET Web Application projects.

Therefore, with these recent releases of the IDE, the process of converting ASP.NET Web Site has largely been a manual process.

Fortunately, there is a command-line tool that can now help you regenerate those ASP.NET designer files for you!  http://sourceforge.net/projects/redesigner/

If you believe that Microsoft should provide the ability to regenerate ASP.NET designer files directly from within the IDE, then you should vote for this UserVoice item here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/8676757-provide-the-ability-to-regenerate-asp-net-designer

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