I'm very fond of creating web application projects in Visual Studio rather then web site projects. While I tend to think web applications offer a lot of advantages with respect to deployment, etc. (Otherwise why would microsoft have brought it back into VS2008) It also has some disadvantages for instance the custom profile class doesn't get generated anymore. On codeplex there is a custom add-in for VS 2005 that solves this shortcomming to some extend. You can also find a related article on Scottgu's blog. Sadly at this point it only works for VS 2005 so I've modified it to work on VS2008 (even the beta 2). Hope it helps some people. You can download it here