I have an Umbraco website that I want to extend. I feel that ASP.Net MVC is the way to go for the extension I'm writing - I particularly like the idea of a Portable Area from MVCContrib. What I'm wondering is, how straightforward would it be to incorporate the Portable Area into Umbraco without recompiling the source?
More generally, is it possible to wire a portable area into an existing application just by modifying web.config? I'm thinking along the lines of creating a HttpModule and including that in web.config.
No, portable areas require a VirtualPathProvider to be set. VirtualPathProviders must be configured via code.
You could try some hacktastic approach using the App_Code folder. It may work.
The current version of Umbraco (4.x) is based on the web-forms model so it won't be easy incorporating MVC into it (though I believe Umbraco 5 - still in planning - will be MVC based).
Generally you either user XSLT or web-form User Controls to add functionality to an Umbraco site. However, I'm not clear what the "extension" you are writing actually does? Perhaps you could expand upon what it is designed to achieve?
Related
I have an old web forms application (.net 3.5) hosted at www.business-app.local
I want to build a new ASP.NET MVC (.net 4.0/4.5) application that will also have the domain name www.business-app.local
I know I can't have two applications with the same domain and port on IIS.
I have tried adding the MVC app in a virtual directory but hit a bunch of web.config clashes.
I want to keep the two applications separate, i.e. it is not a solution to just add the web forms pages to my MVC application, or to add MVC to the web forms application.
How can I achieve this using IIS 8?
The easiest way to do this is to create your new MVC app and add the folders containing the webforms into it. Queti mentions doing this the other way around, but honestly, it's a massive PITA, as you have to hack around with config files and references.
Once you have your webforms pages in specific folders in the MVC app, simply add exclusions for them from routing in global.asax.cs like so:
routes.IgnoreRoute("Webformsfolder/{*pathInfo}")
Also, seeing as you are (I presume) phasing out the webforms stuff eventually, it's probably best to start from scratch anyway, IMHO. Good luck!
You could add MVC to the current application. The trick is to make sure that the routes do not conflict with the web forms directories otherwise the WebForms will be the ones that handle the request.
This is the process I've followed when migrating Web Forms sites to MVC.
I have had to compromise and put them two apps on separate sub domains with a common cookie.
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.
Are there any recommendations for a design surface (or design tool) that could be used by a designer (the dude/dudette with the black turtleneck) in the process of building an ASP.Net MVC application?
Such that once there is agreement on the structure of the Model, and the interactions required by the app, then the designer goes away and builds out the UI (V in MVC) using this design tool, while the developer goes away and builds out the code (M&C in MVC) using Visual Studio.
As I understand it now, this designer person would also need to use Visual Studio and build the Views using Razor (or other view engine) syntax, instead of having the ability to build the Views using a design surface with drag-drop layout and property settings and the like.
I think you could ask them to give you a harcoded HTML for each view... then, you replace the harcoded data once you place it in Razor.
That is the beauty of Razor... it is very easy to pass from fixed HTML to a razor view.
Razor requires programming, and creating views is not an arbitrary task. I'd let the designer work in whatever program they like where they can excel about design and let the programmers worry about how best to create the views and programming in Razor (which is really just C#/VB with some extra syntax).
It depends.. what kind of skills does your designer have? Are they a true designer (no JS/jQuery/etc knowledge.. they live & breath PSDs) or are they a designer/front end engineer (they know js/jQuery, the diff. between IE7 and IE9 from a rendering pov).
If you've got a true designer then the best thing to get would be HTML. A PSD would be okay as well but if they can convert their design into HTML they've done a lot of the hard work for you (unless you love figuring out floats and margins and all that jazz). That said if you're using something like Twitter Bootstrap or Blueprint CSS then they would obviously have to know how to use that as well.
If you're lucky enough to have a designer/front end engineer then it's well worth your time to teach them some basic razor synax like #Url.Action and #Html.BeginForm. They can tell you the actions they need and you can work together by giving them a fake data/response version first which they can use while you create a real version. And in this case they can either use Visual Studio OR you can set it up so that they have your site hosted via IIS on their machine and they just use your source control to get latest which automatically gets placed in the right directory. Then they can just continue working in whatever editor they prefer as they should only be working in html which will get updated live. That said if you're using ASP.Net MVC 4 bundling you'll have to decide how to maintain bundles.
OK so I have a large .NET 4.0 webforms solution with many projects. I want to develop a new set of screens in MVC3 that integrate into the site. Do I need to change the webconfig and routing in the existing webforms (web application) root? That seems risky. Can I just add an MVC3 project and integrate that into the web application? What's the easiest, least risky way? Does all the routing have to be done at the root? Also, we use NCache for state management. Thanks.
There is nothing about the "solution" that is webforms, so yes, you can add an MVC project to the solution. If you want to add MVC3 components to an existing webforms project, you can do that, too, but you will have to do some of the work the MVC3 project wizard does for you, like adding routes in global.asax.cs and making some web.config changes. Once complete, a hybrid webforms/MVC3 application works fine.
My recommendation, if you want to go this route, is to create an MVC application and look at the things that it puts into the Global.asax.cs file and the web.config file and compare that to your current application.
Check out
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntegratingASPNETMVC3IntoExistingUpgradedASPNET4WebFormsApplications.aspx for a good primer.