With the recent release of Service Pack 2 for MCMS, it is now possible to develop MCMS applications using Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 offers a vastly enhanced design time experience and significantly reduces the time to develop solutions. One of the most useful aspects of Visual Studio 2005 for MCMS developers is the improved design time Web designer, which amongst a myriad of new features includes superb support for HTML validation. However with Service Pack 2 MCMS Applications are developed using the new 'Web Site' Visual Studio project type, which has a number of MCMS integration issues and causes an undesirable design time experience for developers.

This article details an approach to using the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project to avoid problems associated with the 'CMS' Virtual Directory and the default Item Templates.