I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 website and I'm looking for a way to package up a set of views and controllers into an external DLL and hopefully use MEF (Dependency Injection) to load the correct controllers and views.
Does anyone know if something like this is possible and any good links to tutorials on the subject?
Precompiled Razor for Shared Views and Mono
Compile your asp.net mvc Razor views into a seperate dll
A combination of those two will probably get the best result in your case - My precompilation code handles some things the single file generator doesn't, but Chris has more use of out of box code at runtime, which is probably better if you only need to run in a standard mvc3 setup.
I have also used aspx files set up as embedded resources ( Views in separate assemblies in ASP.NET MVC ), but Razor is quite a bit easier to work with in compiled form.
Related
I have been given a sample MVC project that contains views with extension .aspx
however when I create a new MVC project using the VS2013 ASP.Net wizard the views have extension .cshtml
Are there 2 kinds of MVC project?
Views in MVC refer to either .cshtml files in C# or .vbhtml files in Visual Basic.
.aspx files are webform files and are not views-- this was the initial approach ASP.NET took to make webform development more similar to desktop application development. These pages are generally included in the route list as actual files, whereas MVC uses controller routes that aren't based on existing files (i.e., the url path doesn't match the file and directory structure like traditional html does), which ultimately serve the views. .aspx files can also have code-behind files to separate the html/aspx markup from the .NET code; those files will have either a .aspx.cs or .aspx.vb extension on them. In an MVC app, these files are also likely to have designer files.
One set of files for an aspx file named MyPage may have the following files:
MyPage.aspx
MyPage.aspx.cs or MyPage.aspx.vb
MyPage.aspx.designer.cs or MyPage.aspx.designer.vb
The files in #3 may be hidden until you select 'show all files' in the project, or may not exist at all in a traditional 'web site' project type. I think you have to upgrade to a 'web application project (Wap)' project type before you can integrate MVC, though I may be wrong. All WAP projects should have these .aspx.designer.xx files.
In MVC what extension should the view file names have?
.cshtml unless you have a reason not to use the Razor view engine with C#.
Are there 2 kinds of MVC project?
The relevant answer is that there are many more than 2 different view engines. Razor was introduce in 2010. The Razor view engine is what comes out of the box in the Visual Studio MVC templates. See ASP.NET MVC View Engine Comparison for more info on more obscure view engines that work with ASP.NET MVC.
I recently joined a group that manages a Classic ASP web application. It has been working fine for our group's need. However, a decision was made, before I joined, to move to ASP .Net. Since we are mostly ASP developers, we write code in ASP .Net as we would in Classic ASP (for the most part). Would it be possible to introduce MVC to this application/project?
Thanks!
Yes, it is possible to use MVC in a traditional WebForms project. I migrated a large WebForms project to MVC 2 a couple of years ago, and here are my findings (I have updated them to reflect MVC 3)
Make sure you have .NET 4.0 installed, as well as the MVC 3 framework and VS extensions.
Create a new blank MVC project to use as a reference.
Look at the default web.config for the reference project. You basically want to use the reference web.config, and merge in stuff you need from your current project.
Look at the reference global.asax.cs. Similar to the above, you want to merge the changes in the reference .cs into your current application's global.asax.cs.
You will need to add the following references to your web project:
System.Web.Abstractions,
System.Web.Extensions,
System.Web.Helpers,
System.Web.Mvc,
System.Web.Routing
You can enable the VS extensions by changing the ProjectTypeGuids:
In Solution Explorer, right-click the project name and select Unload Project. Then right-click the project name again and select Edit ProjectName.csproj.
Locate the ProjectTypeGuids element and add {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}.
Save the changes, right-click the project, and then select Reload Project.
Add the following standard folders for MVC content:
~/Views
~/Views/Shared
~/Controllers
~/Models (for your view models, optional)
~/Content (for CSS and images, optional)
~/Scripts (for JS, optional)
Additional notes:
If your existing WebForms relies on web.config settings for authorization (such as preventing unauthorized users), this won't be recognized by MVC actions, because routing works completely separately from the WebForms authorization. Use AuthorizeAttribute to require authorization, or constrain actions to certain roles or users. You can even specify global filters so you don't have to apply this attribute on every single controller or action.
There may be additional considerations for making MVC work with IIS versions prior to 7, or with application pools that use the Classic pipeline. Consider using IIS 7+ with Integrated pipeline.
My notes above mainly involve getting the baseline of MVC working, which uses ASPX views. ASPX views use the same markup as the ASPX files you are used to in WebForms. You can also use the new Razor syntax (primer), which I highly recommend. You can use both ASPX and Razor view pages at the same time. However, you cannot use an ASPX master page on a Razor view (or vice versa). Also, MVC will find and use ASPX views before Razor views, so if you upgrade a view to Razor, delete the original ASPX. You will need to do a little additional work to enable Razor views. I'm trying to find my notes for enabling Razor. I'll update when I find them. Once you do have Razor installed and working, you can use this tool by Telerik to convert ASPX to Razor.
Here is a question on SO about a problem I'd had while upgrading. I'm only providing it because it covered some of the points I mentioned above in more detail. However, I was upgrading to MVC 2 at the time, so some of this stuff is out of date.
The short answer is yes it is possible.
Scott Hanselman has written about this topic before.
Depending on the skills in your team, you may well find it difficult to get up to speed - it is possible to write clean MVC style code in Classic ASP but most people don't.
It is of course technically possible. However, it sounds like it would be a cultural shock, as MVC works quite a bit differently than Classic ASP or ASP.NET WebForms. I think it would be worthwhile to do - or just stick with ASP.NET WebForms if that seems more natural. But if you've not yet fully committed to WebForms, MVC seems just as easy to move to, IMO.
Yes. I worked on a project that began as plain ASP.NET and later added some ASP.NET MVC pages. Eventually we liked MVC so much more that we eventually migrated all of our WebForms pages to use MVC instead. But the whole time, the two systems worked very well together.
Here's the only real gotcha that I can remember running into: WebForms works by having the entire page encased in a big <form> tag. Since HTML doesn't allow you to have nested <form> tags, you typically can't use MVC forms inside of a WebForms page. Either keep your WebForms pages separate from your MVC content, avoid using HTML forms in MVC content that may appear on a WebForms page, or use popup dialogs for your forms that get created outside of the WebForms DOM area.
Here is what I want to achieve, I want to separate AREAs of ASP.NET MVC as pure single DLL.
Blog.DLL
Forums.DLL
FAQ.DLL
Each of them are individual ASP.NET MVC Area, with its own default CSHTML or ASPX pages. Installing, migrating and maintaining lots of pages including resources, javascripts and so on are real pain for long run. As most of these will hardly change.
My final website will be like this.
\MvcApplication
\bin
\MvcApplication.bin
\Blog.dll
\Forums.dll
\Controllers
\..
\Models
\..
\Views
\..
\Global.asax
\Web.config
Without adding any thing, just dropping Blog.dll, my application should support /blog and all its pages. If I want to customize something, than I can add area, and add only cshtml pages..
\MvcApplication
\bin
\MvcApplication.bin
\Blog.dll
\Forums.dll
\Areas
\Blog
\Views
\Shared
\BlogLayout.cshtml <-- this will override the look
\Controllers
\..
\Models
\..
\Views
\..
\Global.asax
\Web.config
This will help in reusing ASP.NET Area Plugins, by simply dropping the dll in bin folder. However web.config may require some changes, but most likely we will save configure values in database and only thing needed will be "Entity Framework connection string" in web.config.
My challenges (Questions)
Is it possible? It sure looks to me, but will there be any reflection/permission issues?
How do I include cshtml/aspx views within one DLL? Probably compiled versions? I have seen couple of text template based View Engines on codeplex but I am little confused on how to actually use them.
And how do I get ViewEngine to first check if physical directory file exists or not and then look into cshtml/aspx within the dll itself as resource file?
You may take a look at the following article which illustrates how a custom VirtualPathProvider could be used in order to retrieve Razor views that are embedded into separate assemblies as resources.
Maybe worth looking at portable areas from mvccontrib. I haven't used them since MVC 2, but found the following SO question by someone having some problems using them with MVC 3, with some possible solutions: ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor Views, and Portable Areas
MvcCodeRouting supports what you want, plus many other cool stuff. Check out this post about ASP.NET MVC Plugins.
We have an existing ASP.Net Web Application. I would like to create an ASP.Net MVC Razor Application where the two applications will work together. A single Master Page would contain menu items that can call .aspx pages as well as Razor .cshtml pages.
I have seen an example using MvcContrib Portable areas utilizing Routing. This particular example has .aspx pages in both (the MVC was not Razor).
Is there an example out there that will show the two running side-by-side and the MVC is Razor? It would be best if I could download a visual Studio Solution so that I can run this.
I am not sure if the MvcContrib way is the latest and best way to achieve this.
I do not want to go Hybrid!
You don't need any other external librarry. You can always convert the existing ASP.NET web forms Project to be a Hybrid one which uses webforms and MVC. You need to add the required MVC assembly references and make some changes to the web.config and you are all set. Scott has a simple and awesome blog post about this where he explains how to do the conversion.
I scribbled a note about how to enable the MVC specific Context menu( Add Controller / Add View) in the hybrid project after conversion here
What options do we have for scaffolding controllers in ASP.NET MVC (v2 and v3 RC)? I know about the code templates folder and T4 but it only allows creating one .tt file and thus, replacing the default controller template with your own but what I would need is different types of templates for various types of controllers.
I've heard that Rails has huge support for this. I'm also aware of the MvcScaffold package in MVC 3 (via NuGet) as described and developed by Scott Hanselman which supports ControllerWithContext and ControllerWithRepository but I would like to take this further and since the source code hasn't been published (at least I'm not aware of it) there isn't much I can do to customize it.
What do you guys use or do?
There is the Generic Controller (Controller<T>) technique. Big fan.