I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into why ASP.NET MVC sites have to be created as a web application (compiles to single .dll) in Visual Studio as opposed to a web site (each page is a .dll)? I suspect that it has something to do with the routing. Any thoughts?
Web Applications have a .csproj file which gives a lot better control over the build process when compared to a Web Site project which is really just a set of files and folders with build managed entirely by the VS IDE as far as i'm aware.
You may be right about the routing, but another possible reason relates to project structure and the relationship between the MVC application project and it's test project.
One of the key differences between a Web Application and a Web Site is that the Web Site is a standalobe entity, it does not exist within a solution which makes it difficult to express the relationship of the test project to the application project, whereas if a web application is used then the web site and it's tests can be treated as two projects within a common solution while also getting all the benefits of using MSBuild
Okay, I figured this out. The only reason that the ASP.NET MVC application is a Web Application instead of a Web Site has to do with the unit tests. You can 'convert' an ASP.NET MVC application to a web site with very little changes, but the unit tests won't work because they have no reference to the web site. But, I'm pretty sure that you can get the unit tests to work if you start pulling your application logic (controllers, et al) into a separate class library and then reference that class library in the web site and unit tests.
Related
All the action is client side in a SPA app. The Visual Studio Durandal and Hot Towel project templates both serve the SPA out of an ASP.NET MVC application.
What, if anything, does the ASP.NET MVC infrastructure bring to the party? As far I can see all it does is make it hard to serve a WCF Web Service (ajax enabled) out of the project web.
Yet both of the project templates are set up like this. What have I missed?
As a matter of fact, ASP.NET MVC in this template is not necessary. All it does is serve the initial Razor template for the SPA and provides you with the bundling and optimization support of all the client side javascript resources for the application so that when you deploy your application you don't end up with gazillions of HTTP requests from the client to fetch all the .js crap necessary for the application to work. Of course you could perfectly fine have used the bundling feature outside of ASP.NET MVC in a simple and plain ASP.NET web application.
What, if anything, does the ASP.NET MVC infrastructure bring to the party?
See the documentation:
Hot Towel builds on the familiar and powerful ASP.NET MVC structure.
App_Start
Content
Controllers
Models
Scripts
Views
As far I can see all it does is make it hard to serve a WCF Web Service (ajax enabled) out of the project
You can't just right-click your project and add a new WCF Service?
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.
We have a website that was written in classic ASP, then I started to extend it using web forms. These extensions exist in a subfolder of the main folder. Now we've decided we'd prefer to use MVC3. Also, as we'd like to convert all our site to MVC3 over time, we are hosting the MVC code in the application root. I've found some other questions where people have a similar issue to mine, but no solution. The issue is simply that my web forms app can't seem to be stopped from inheriting the web.config settings from the root folder, and as a result, it won't run, it either complains about missing dlls, or complains about running the wrong version of .NET, or complains I need to remove some settings ( which I try and can never get to work right ). The app in the subfolder is also hosting a webservice that is called by our application, and it also runs HTTP handlers to protect our imaging content, so it's got a bit of stuff in it. Do I need to run my MVC site in a subfolder ? Is there any way to have MVC in the folder above a web forms app ? I'd prefer to set things up so they share session data, but that's looking likely to be impossible at this stage...
So to be clear the folder structure is:
<root>
contains asp site and MVC site.
<subfolder>
contains webforms application
</subfolder>
</root>
and my issue is getting the subfolder to run, preferably in the same session as the MVC app.
There is no reason you can't run regular .aspx files on an MVC site. You are correct though, web.config settings are inherited from the parent (chain), but you just add a new web.config in your directory with relevant settings.
What you will have to do is play with the routes, because by default MVC will route all requests into your controller classes. But if you google around its fairly simple to add an exception to the routing.
If you post some of the specific errors we can probably help further.
Oh and do you mean Classic ASP? i.e. not Classic ASP.NET? Because you'll have fun sharing session data between ASP & ASP.NET.
I apologize for the vague title - I am new to ASP.NET MVC coming from PHP, and I have teamed up with a .NET developer that has a webforms background.
When working with MVC in PHP, all of my files are visible on the server - that is to say, I can go into any of my model, view and controller files and edit any of the code remotely without a problem.
In .NET MVC, I couldn't find the controller or model files, so I asked the developer how the webpage is being put together, and he told me about how .NET compiles code into .DLL files and that I am unable to access this. I wanted to view a controller to see how it was pulling together my views, but didn't even see a controller folder on the server.
To me, something about this doesn't sound right, but I am not sure because of my lack of experience in .NET. Can someone provide input as to if this is the typical .NET scenario, and if not, what is he doing wrong? Should I take this as a red flag? Keep in mind that .NET MVC is new to both of us.
Thanks!
There is no code files because these code files was compiled into DLL files during Publish process. It's not strange - it's even better because of performance reasons. It's common scenario for all ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications.
You can deploy yor application via XCopy deployment (to have all .CS files etc.): simply copy all files to destination folder. Then your site will be compiled (into App_temp destination) by runtime on first run. Your .CS files will still be in place.
You can read more about Publishing procees here:
Walkthrough: Publishing a Web Site
Publishing Web Sites
I can’t get a basic MVC site to work on my web server unless I’ve compiled it first in Visual Web Developer. If it doesn’t have a dll in the Bin, it says the Namespace can’t be found.
In classic asp.net I could just upload the files and the server would compile it at first run. Is this not the case in MVC? Essentially I’d like to build an MVC site without using Visual Web Developer.
That's cause ASP.NET MVC is not based on the Website model that many ASP.NET Web Forms apps were. It is based on the Web application model.
You can read about Web Application Projects here.
I've read about people migrating the Web Application to the Web site model in ASP.NET MVC but I don't recommended it.
Yes, you do need to compile an MVC site and deploy some DLLs in a bin folder when you deploy an MVC site
You can build MVC without Visual web developer... but why?