Hi Veronika,

The difference between binary and source is that binary has no C# source code. All the code is compiled into dlls in the bin folder beneath the root of the web. This is the best practice for production servers and pretty standard for ASP.NET projects using the code behind model. You don't want to deploy source code on production servers as this is potentially a security issue and source code is not needed on production since everything is pre-compiled.

If you want to learn ASP.NET, I think mojoPortal is a good project to study as the source code is well organized and very readable (at least in my opinion )

I recommend that you get the source code from svn rather than the .zip

Read the documentation starting here for more info:
http://www.mojoportal.com/developinginvisualstudio.aspx

It would be good to get a book on ASP.NET as well, though there are a lot of good online resources.
Whenever I find sites or pages of interest for ASP.NET I bookmark them here:
http://www.joeaudette.com/aspnetlinks.aspx


Hope it helps,

Joe

Well, the svn code is more up to date. Once you have been able to get the code using TortoiseSVN, if you find a bug and we fix it, you can easily get the update from svn whereas the .zip file is only updated when we make a release.

The svn code may be a little less stable though since that is where development is currently happening. Since new features may have been added in svn since the last release, you should be aware that sometimes the db must be altered. Currently there is a need to update the db unless you are doing a clean install from svn db s cripts, you will want to look at the upgradeFrom1.0Tonext.sql in the folder corresponding to the db you want to use if you are using a db setup from the previous release.
If you do a clean install, you don't need any updates and if updating from the last release you only need the most recent upgrade sql file.
Also it should not be needed to run the createdata sql file as the svn versions now create their own data when the application runs the first time.

Things are changing rapidly in the 2.1 branch for VS 2005/.NET 2.0 as we are trying to take advantage of new features in the .NET framework.

If you run into difficulties be sure and tell me which version of VS you are using and which db you are using.

Cheers,

Joe