I have an interesting situation where I need to deploy an ASP.NET MVC app to a (pseudo-boss's) local desktop machine so they can run it locally for data entry purposes. What would be the best way to get the app running on a vista machine without Visual Studio installed?
Ideally, It would be a one click that started a development web server and opened the page up in the browser.
I considered installing Visual Web Developer and then tricking it's dev web server into running the app, or even installing mono, since it has the nice 'start xsp here' feature that even a non-technical person can understand. The big thing is that this person is not very technical, so it needs to be easy for them to start and stop the application.
You need IIS installed, which should be available for Vista. Then just set up a working directory and put your app there, it's not 1 click but maybe.,.. 5.. :)
What about the Microsoft Web Platform Installer? You'd still have to add your own application, but it takes care of .NET, IIS, and dependencies.
Could you use something like UltiDev Cassini: http://www.ultidev.com/products/Cassini/ and build your own installer to set everything up for your user?
Related
I'm currently developing a new sitecore website.
There's my working project on my local machine and a project on a staging server. The staging server does not have Visual Studio.
I want to connect via Sitecore Explorer to the project on the server. But it seems like i can only give local folders when i try to create a new connection.
( The reason i want this is because there is some functionality that is available in sitecore explorer but not in the /myWebsite/sitecore interface.
Does anyone know how to achieve this ?
It is not recommended that you use Sitecore Rocks in an environment other than development as it can open up some potential security issues.
However, there is a standalone version here that can be installed without VS.
http://vsplugins.sitecore.net/install/default.html
I would do what you need to do in Rocks then uninstall when done.
If you already have the sitecore rocks configured in the staging environment (by copying it from dev, for example), you could connect, leaving the "Location" field empty.
Only operations requiring access to the folder would fail, but most of the functionality should work.
I have Visutal Studio 2012, MVC 4 & Razor. I am having trouble getting a website up and running with this technology.
The Web Server is a Windows Server 2008 server. I tried deploying using the Web Deploy method but am consistently getting something like 'set ACL" error.
I tried deploying using the File System. All files got deployed, but when I try and run the website, it fails because of missing ASP.NET MVC infrastruccture files.
Two things:
•If I use Web-Deploy, how do I solve the ACL error, because I assume with this method, everything needed will get deployed.
Note that the Web Deploy 3.0 service is on the server and started.
•If I use File System, where can I find the downloads needed to deploy on the server where MVC WILL work.
◦Note that I downloaded the 4.5 Framework and was successfully installed.
You need to be a bit more precise with what you need help with.
What's the exact error.
Often times you need to give the IIS users group access to at least read from the directory where you've deployed. Did you do this already?
Do you have .NET 4.5 and MVC4 installed on the server? If not, are you expecting those DLLs to be "packaged" with your deployment? They generally are not since they are "standard" assemblies. But if you want them to be included in your deployment you can do that by selecting the references in VS and saying "copy." This is not recommended because when you install patches to .NET and MVC on the server, those updates will not carry through to your app, since it'll use the local (old) copies of your assemblies.
This may be more of an IIS issue, but not sure based on the details in your question.
Check that the application pool that the site is running under is using .net 4.0.
Just a thought I would check.
ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio 2010, C#/.NET4. I'm using IIS Express as the web server of choice, as it more accurately mirrors our production configurations in IIS7. However, when I go through following process, the libraries used by IIS Express don't seem to be updating.
Run app, find bug
Stop VS2010, fix bug
Build/Run
Testing reveals the new code is not being used
IIS Express continues to run even after stopping the debugger in VS2010, so I'm assuming it's just holding onto the binaries that were used when it was initially launched. Is there a way to get it to use the updated binaries? Or is this the expected behavior? Right now, the only way I can get the new binaries used is to completely exit VS2010 and then reload the project/solution. Even selecting "stop" from the IISExpress systray icon doesn't seem to actually help (it doesn't appear to actually stop the process).
Obviously closing VS2010 and reloading the solution each time is a less-than-ideal workflow.
EDIT: The project is configured to run IIS Express from right click project -> Web. The project URL does not use any virtual directories, it is at root of the local host on port 60830. I thought I remembered seeing IIS Express in the F4 properties listing before, it's not listed there at all right now.
Is there a way to create an installable (ideally XCopy installable) version of an ASP.NET MVC application that will run in a standalone fashion on a Windows XP machine?
I don't mind installing SQL Server Express for this purpose, so I guess the question boils down to this: Can the Cassini web server that comes with Visual Studio 2008 be bundled with the application? Or are there other options?
NOTE: The installation is for demo purposes only, so there are no licensing problems. Also, I am suggesting Cassini because I don't know of a way to install IIS7 on Windows XP. I can't do major hackage on the registry to get this to work.
Not sure if it'll help, but you could definitely check out the UltiDev Cassini Web Server, which can be bundled with your app and should support what you need.
You can package, embed, bend fold and spindle CassiniDev with my blessings.
I have been told that it suits this purpose admirably.
I think this is a bit old, but check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188791.aspx.
Also, the ComponentArt demos run on Cassini.
My company makes a product for this purpose called the Neokernel Web Server which includes several features that are missing from cassini like SSL support, logging, multi-threaded request processing, and the ability to start/stop/configure the server from your own process.
A free 30 day evaluation license is available for testing and evaluation purposes.
http://www.neokernel.com
The project is developed using ASP.NET MVC framework and heavily relies on .NET 3.5.
What would be the best solution to allow a web designer, who is using OSX, to develop the site's UI? Basically he would just need to edit the aspx, css and js files, but also run the web application locally.
I've thought of some possibilites:
Install parallels/vmware/bootcamp and set up everything as you would for windows. Bad: it would be slow, OSX user doesn't like working in windows
Set up Mono and run the webapp on that. Use whatever tool you want for editing the front end files. Bad: does mono support MVC framework, .NET 3.5 and database connections? Unfamiliar platform, so possibly a lot of work setting it up, if it even will work.
Run the site on a separate server, and edit the front end files via network drive. Bad: our development server is so slow that seeing the changes takes too long...
Do you have other ideas or comments for these options?
Thanks!
You could try using a virtual machine. VirtualBox is a free one and is quite simple to setup. The only downside is that you need your own copy of Windows...
What you really need to do is have your web designer mock up the pages in static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript first (in their environment of preference.) Once that's done, adapting the markup to the ASP.NET project should be easily doable by yourself or the designer on a Windows machine (or virtual machine, your preference).
The MVC framework is part of Mono. Ares Technica has an article about the MVC framework and running it on Mono.
While it seems that some people were able to hack the framework to work on Mono back in March and April of this year, Microsoft has since released the MVCframework as open source and it is now fully supported by Mono as of the 2.4.2 release.
Here is a link to the most recent Mono releases along with Virtual Machine images that already been pre-configured to give you the best development experience.
Good luck with your project and hope this helps some.