One of the first steps in building a long-lived ASP.NET project is to define standards for how to use the many features of the platform. Without such standards, it is easy for the project to degenerate into a jumble of different development techniques and styles. One developer may use Master Pages extensively in her part of the project, for example, while another favors nested user controls. The end result is a tangle of different techniques applied across the application, making it difficult to make high-level architectural decisions or changes.
Enforcing these standards for developing applications can be difficult, however, due to the lack of tools. The wizards and designers in Visual Studio® are typically focused at a smaller level of granularity, with convenient tools for creating Web pages with codebehind, Web sites with code directories, and so on. If you decide on a set of standards that are not directly supported by the normal tools within your development environment, you have to either build your own tools or create very specific instructions for developers to follow when performing certain tasks.
This is precisely the problem that the patterns & practices team at Microsoft set out to solve with the Web Client Software Factory. It created a toolset designed specifically for the task of building large Web sites with ASP.NET that are worked on by many developers concurrently.
