In my jump into using Web Deployment Projects with Web Application Projects I ran into an issue which is rather obvious after the fact, but thought it would be good to share for Google searchers.

When creating a new solution/project configuration (i.e. dev, test, production, etc.) in Visual Studio 2005, which is useful to do when using Web Deployment Projects, make sure you set the output path for the Web project to “/bin”. By default a new configuration gets an output path of “/bin/[configuration]”. If the web assembly is not in /bin, the aspnet compiler portion of the Web Deployment project will fail with errors like this:

error ASPPARSE: Could not load type ‘code behind class’