R – Can you create an ASP.NET MVC website without the project

asp.netasp.net-mvcconfiguration

Is it possible to create a MVC website without having to create a MVC web application via Visual Studio? Basically I just want it to be a simple website and not to have to recompile it in VS. I want to develop it as a 'Web Site' on a test server and connect with front page extensions in VS express. If I copy the files from a MVC Application, remove the namespace of the project in the files I just get errors:

Default.aspx

Default.aspx.cs

using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.UI;

public partial class MyDefaultPage : System.Web.UI.Page
{
public void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
….

Parser Error Message: Could not load type '_Default'.

Any ideas much appreciated.

Best Solution

ASP.NET MVC controllers are compiled .NET classes. You could edit the source and compile via the command line, but you'll still need to compile the source code in order for it to work.

I've never used front page extensions, but I doubt that they would be helpful when working with ASP.NET MVC.

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Use the base controllers File method.

public ActionResult Image(string id)
{
    var dir = Server.MapPath("/Images");
    var path = Path.Combine(dir, id + ".jpg"); //validate the path for security or use other means to generate the path.
    return base.File(path, "image/jpeg");
}

As a note, this seems to be fairly efficient. I did a test where I requested the image through the controller (http://localhost/MyController/Image/MyImage) and through the direct URL (http://localhost/Images/MyImage.jpg) and the results were:

MVC: 7.6 milliseconds per photo
Direct: 6.7 milliseconds per photo

Note: this is the average time of a request. The average was calculated by making thousands of requests on the local machine, so the totals should not include network latency or bandwidth issues.

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>