Peter Seale's weblog
(take 2) Site now runs on ASP.NET MVC
HOWDY!
This is a quick announcement to let you know that my site now runs on ASP.NET MVC. A few things have been updated:
- My sweet SharePoint search page (follow this link for description) has been updated with the NEW MSDN forums search, and the NEW Google Groups (USENET) search. It turns out I wasn't searching USENET much because this thing has been broken for months now . Anyway, check it out--you either need it or you don't.
- My best-of-breed CAPTCHA is back! See pseale.com/captcha for details.
- Similarly, my regularly-updated wealth clock (pseale.com/clock) is back! I'm sure you all missed it as I have.
(strike that) dasBlog 2.1 running on ASP.NET MVC Preview 5
dasBlog 2.2 running on ASP.NET MVC Beta
First thing I should point out is that I'm running under IIS7 Integrated mode on shared hosting. If you're attempting this, be sure you're running on IIS 7 in Integrated mode. If you're trying to test this out on your own machine, this means you must be running Vista or Server 2008, must create a fresh web site in IIS and make sure the app pool is running on Integrated mode. Let me be clear: you can't properly test on the Cassini web server running your Visual Studio project.
ALSO: Now that ASP.NET MVC Beta adds itself to the GAC, for a while (until you host loads the dll's to its server's GAC), you'll have to make local copies of each ASP.NET MVC dll. "Copy Local" a property under each assembly Reference--set it to True for each one of them.
Ok. There are three things you have to do to get dasBlog working underneath an ASP.NET MVC app.
First, in your MVC app, set Routing to ignore your blog's folder. Mine is called "/blog". Here's what it looks like (I think I stole this from a Phil Haack blog post, so if it looks familiar, it is):
Second, and this won't be an option for all of you--I removed all the System.Web.Extensions (AKA ASP.NET AJAX, AKA "Atlas") from my root MVC app. This fixed the problem I was experiencing with my ASMX-powered RSS feed, which Atlas usurps by default (thanks Ben for the tip, that did the trick).
Third, we need to do some heavy work on the dasBlog web.config. First I'll say, thanks to Paulb on the dasBlog team for providing the starter IIS7 web.config. Big ups to changeset 14700.
Instead of attempting to explain in detail any of the nasty things I've done to make the dasBlog 2.2 web.config work under the most recent MVC drop, I'll just post my web.config directly for viewing. I don't recommend what I've done for others; instead I'll say that I got my web.config minimally working underneath a small MVC-based site.
If you're reading this blog post because no one else has provided a better explanation, then maybe perusing my web.config will help.
Without further ado, I present you: web.config of my dasBlog application running underneath an ASP.NET MVC site.
KNOWN ISSUE: http://www.pseale.com/blog (without the trailing slash) bombs out with an error. http://www.pseale.com/blog/ works fine. I assume it has something to do with the blowery.web component, something that I have no desire to fix; I'll work around the problem with a Routing fix/hack. Anyway, lesson learned: BEWARE TRAILING SLASHES!
UPDATE: apparently the blowery.web compression is somehow interfering with delivery of my CSS files. I say apparently because I didn't attempt to troubleshoot this, I just disabled the HttpModule...with extreme prejudice! As much extreme prejudice as one can muster against an HttpModule, anyway.