<p>There is a conversion process that is needed when migrating Visual Studio 2005 web site to Visual Studio 2008 web application projects.</p>

<p>It looks like VS2008 is creating a .designer. file for every aspx when you right click on a file or the project itself in Solution Explorer and select 'Convert to Web Application.'</p>

<p>What is the purpose of these designer files?  And these won't exist on a release build of the web application, they are just intermediate files used during development, hopefully?</p>

[{'answer_id': 28490, 'author': 'Kibbee', 'author_id': 1862, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1862', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>They hold all the form designer stuff that used to go in the #Region " Web Form Designer Generated Code " section of the code.  instead of putting it in the .aspx.vb file where people might edit it (mistakenly or not), it\'s been moved to a separate file, so that you don\'t have ever look at it.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 30167, 'author': 'Joel Coehoorn', 'author_id': 3043, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3043', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>What kibbee said.  </p>\n\n<p>For the part of your question about existing on a release build, it depends on what kind of web site you have.  If you have a pre-compiled web site, then <em>none</em> of code files (.vb, .cs, etc) need to be deployed the server.  They are compiled into .dlls (assemblies) and deployed that way along with the .as*x files.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/28481', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1341/']