The scenario:
I'm very new to ASP.Net MVC programming and running into a wall constantly trying to make use of common files (.js, .css) across multiple projects.
The idea is to have these generic files in 1 location which provides for easy future updates and avoids the "copy and paste" dilemma across all the projects. I've set this folder up in IIS7 as a virtual directory in the default website with an alias "CommonFiles".
The problem:
With MVC-4 I'm trying to add the js files to a script bundle but upon running the application it's not picking the files up at all. (checked in the page source and also added a js function as a test)
Code snippet in BundleConfig.cs:
bundles.Add(new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/test").Include("~/CommonFiles/test.js"));
Rendering in _Layout.cshtml:
#Scripts.Render("~/bundles/test")
I've read quite a few posts (
Script Bundling in WebForms with Virtual Directories (asp webforms though), How to add reference to System.Web.Optimization for MVC-3-converted-to-4 app, ScriptBundle not rendering scripts that are in a VirtualDirectory) but i'm afraid my lack of knowledge on MVC is limiting my path forward and really hoping to get some insight into how MVC handles IIS virtual directories and if it's even an easy possibility given the last post i've read above.
Can this be done in MVC-4 and if not what is a second best alternative in reusing common code across projects?
After reading a post by kev (Using ServerManager to create Application within Application) it put me on the right path and the issue I had is actually embarrassing.
For the sake of other devs landing on this post with a similar issue in visual studio, this is what fixed my issue:
Problem:
I make use of a separate project which contains files that are used across multiple other projects. I created a virtual folder in IIS7 referencing these files. This means if a change is needed to the common files, it's updated once and all the other projects will automatically "see" the change.
My other individual projects make use of script bundling to include files relevant only to the said project, but also to reference the common files in the virtual folder as defined in IIS.
My MVC-4 web application wasn't picking up the common files given the syntax above, in neither debug or release..
Solution:
When developing in VS2012, under the project's properties, there's a setting under the web tab where you can specify whether you want to use local IIS web server or IIS Express to test your application. IIS Express adds a random port to the site in order to test, and to allow multiple instances of sites to run (on different ports). This seems to throw the virtual directory include off in the bundling.
Choosing to use the local IIS server is closer to what the "live" environment would be in my opinion. Just un-tick the "Use IIS Express" setting.
As a side note and for more info on what the difference between the usage of IIS and IIS express is and whether it's suitable for your environment (as it was for mine) see this link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/58wxa9w5.aspx
Hope this helps someone in future and saves them the amount of time I wasted on this!
Related
This title would be too long, but this is more isolated issue:
Why ASP.NET Core web application does not serve static web assets when started from command line and the ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT is not set, or set to any other value than "Development"?
Context
I've created a new ASP.NET Core Web Application using the VS 2022 built in template (.NET 6, but I do not think the issue/question is .NET 5 specific) I did not altered the created application in any way
I am able to run my ASP.NET Core web application under IIS Express, or without IIS Express using Visual Studio, based on launchsettings.json., I mean using the green triangle dropdown, and pick WebApplication instead IIS Express
Just for the sake of curiosity, I've tried to launch the WebApplication1.exe from the bin folder. It starts, I can access it via browser using https://localhost:5001/, the page loads, but without CSS, JS. I can see that all requests for static resources have a 404 response.
I suspect that I should somehow configure the app, where the static web resources are. I see that the corresponding WebApplication1.runtimeconfig.json and WebApplication1.staticwebassets.runtime.json (formerly WebApplication1.staticwebassets.xml) are there... but later I figured out that magically the environment ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT is related to the issue.
What I've tried so far?
In the command shell I set the environment variable to
SET ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development
...then started then I started WebApplication.exe, this case all is working, static web assets are served.
Question
In the very simple Program.cs and startup code I do not see any conditional logic regarding ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT variable, so I do not understand the issue, why is the difference? (I've also checked the differences between the two appsettings.json and appsettings.Development.json: no related differences.
As an ultimate goal, I would like to automate the start of the WebApplication.exe for functional testing purposes, and I would like to start it sometimes as ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development but other times without that setting.
Why is the difference regarding static web assets serving depending on ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development, and how to run and serve static web assets without that setting from command line?
The question is a bit misleading, as the artifacts in bin/Debug folder is for debugging and not for general testing, so it is not guaranteed to work or supposed to work as you described.
The reason why you found it is not working is because there is no static assets in bin/Debug folder. It works in development environment and not in production (the default when no environment set) because the default builder calls UseStaticWebAssets only in development environment.
https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/blob/4e7d976438b0fc17f435804e801d5d68d193ec33/src/DefaultBuilder/src/WebHost.cs#L221
Inside UseStaticWebAssets, it processes .staticwebssets.runtime.json file to resolve the real path of your static assets. That is how it works and why it does only when environment is development.
If you want to have it works as it supposes to, you should publish your project to a folder and call the executable from there. The publish tool will also publish your static assets into that folder so it will work whether you set the environment config or not.
I'm looking into using ASP.Net Core MVC for some of my new projects. I work on a team of developers for a very large organization, and we each individually write a lot of small web apps. Due to the size of our organization, we have a lot of rules that we have to follow, and sometimes those rules change, completely out of our control. So this is what we have used in the past projects, all running on IIS:
ASP Classic - Each IIS root folder has a shared folder, containing a lot of commonly used .asp files. These files are mostly the same on each server, but can point to different databases for dev/test/prod environments. These library files are used for common things like authentication, authorization, encryption, sending emails, etc... Each application would be in a sibling folder to the shared folder, and include files like "..\shared\library.asp"
ASP.Net / MVC - The closest thing we could find was the GAC. Everybody says not to use the GAC, but for our purposes it does exactly what we need. We built a DLL library, and store it in the GAC of each web server. We then put local configuration (dev/test/prod environment specific stuff) information on the global web.config of each IIS server. Application specific information would be stored in that application's local web.config file.
The beauty of these two systems, is sometimes things change, and we can simply go update the global libraries, and every application that depends on them will adapt to the new code without needing a recompile. We have many applications, running on many web servers. This may not be ideal, but for our needs it works perfectly, considering the rules can change at a moment's notice, and recompiling every application would be a huge ordeal. We just have to be sure not to ever introduce breaking changes into our libraries, which is simple enough. We have zero problems with how it works.
Now, on to ASP.Net Core. Is there an elegant way to do this? It seems like Core doesn't support the GAC, nor does it support web.config. Everything wants to use appsettings.json. Is there a way to create an appsettings.json at the root level of IIS, and have it set global variables like environment="dev", authdatabase="devsql" etc? And can we store a .Net Core/Standard DLL in a shared folder, and have every app load it with a path like "..\shared\library.dll"? The closest thing I could find to do this with .Net framework was the GAC, but I'm not really finding any answers for this with Core. I appreciate any help, thanks!
sometimes things change, and we can simply go update the global libraries, and every application that depends on them will adapt to the new code without needing a recompile
Note that this is exactly one of the reasons why GAC deployment is usually avoided. If you update a dependency, and that happens to contain a breaking change (in any possibly case), then applications will start to break randomly without you having control over that.
Usually, if you update a dependency, you should have to retest every application that depends on that before you deploy the updated application. That is why dependency updates (e.g. via NuGet) are deliberate choices you need to make.
.NET Core avoids this in general by never sharing assemblies between applications and by allowing different versions side-by-side. That way, you can update applications one by one without affecting others.
This is actually a primary reason why .NET Core was made in the first place: The .NET Framework is shipped with Windows, and is a global thing. All applications will always use the same framework version. So whenever Microsoft ships an update to the .NET Framework, they have to be incredibly careful not to break applications. And that is incredibly difficult because countless applications depend on all kinds of things in the framework. Even fixing a possibly obvious bug can break stuff.
With .NET Core and side-by-side dependencies, this is no longer a problem because updates will not automatically break applications that still depend on older versions. It is a developer’s explicit choice to update an application, shipping newer dependencies.
So you should actually embrace this and start to develop your applications independently. If you have common dependencies, consider creating (private) NuGet packages for those, so that applications can depend on them and so that you have a good way to update them properly.
I want to deploy on IIS my web site but I do not want to take whole project. I just need to take .dll file. Is their any way to do so.
I do not want to use visual studio only .dll file from the project to deploy.
The basic steps for deploying to IIS on windows server are as follows:
log onto the machine that is or will be hosting your application.
Use IIS Manager to create a new website for your application.
Create a new application in that site. I believe this also will automatically create an application pool with the same name for you and use it by default.
Specify the virtual directory for your application. This is going to tell IIS where to look for your mvc application. For this case lets assume it is C:\myApp
On your own machine Build the application however you build it with the correct solution configuration (i.e. Release mode). Let say the result of your build is located at C:\MyProject\bin
Copy C:\MyProject\bin from your machine onto your hosting machine at C:\myApp
You should be able to search these steps and find a step by step guide of how to accomplish them. Here is a link to some info on what sites, applications and app pools are to help you better understand.
http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/planning-your-iis-architecture/understanding-sites-applications-and-virtual-directories-on-iis
Based on your sites requirements there will be some additional steps to set up security and alter bindings if you need to change them.
You don't need to deploy your entire website if you only make a change in a single assembly. You could copy the .DLL assembly directly to the bin folder of your website. This will trigger the Application Pool to be recycled in IIS and the changes will be taken into effect on the next request.
I'm planning to create a pure Dart application where both the HTTP server and the web client side is written in Dart. Coming from Java and Eclipse the ultimate would be that i can open the whole project hierarchy in Dart Editor and be able to run the server which serves the client files and debug both sides of the app (server side with the DartVM and client side with Dartium).
I've fired up Dart Editor and after creating a simple Command-line application as the basis for the server side i got confused with the project layout.
The direct server side code files (web server boostrap class, handler and filter classes) are definietly going into the projects bin/ folder. Server side dependencies are going into the project's pubspec.yaml file.
The problem arrises when the server have to access the client application files (.dart files, static page source, etc.) in order to serve them to the browser. The easiest solution would be to create a web folder inside the server project and put client web files there, but this way (as far as i understood) server side dependencies are inherited into the client because we are still in the same pubspec scope. I don't want this.
I thought about creating a client library in the projects lib/ folder and put web files there but i don't know how good practice is to put a complete web application into there. I guess i have to put HTML and other client static files into the asset/ subfolder of the lib. I'm affraid that i'm loosing web application assist from the IDE this way.
What i might also be able to do is to put the client into a separate project, organize it like a Dart webapp project with it's very own pubspec.yaml and then make this the dependency of the server application somehow. I don't know if this way the server could access web files in the other project for serving. Probably this is the best way of doing it because it provides a clean separation of the client and server files.
Can somebody enlighten me what's the correct way of doing this?
Some more explanation.
Say i'm going with the separate project approach as others already suggesting in the answers but i still like to run the server which is able to serve the client in the development phase without any fancy hack. The server has to access the client files in the other project. It doesn't matter if its Javascript or Dart, the static files are there anyway. And during development i wish to serve the dart files since Dartium speeds up development with it's direct Dart running capability significantly.
With Java and Maven i can make the client package a runtime dependency of the server and i can simply serve the client files from the classpath. Does Dart support accessing a pub dependency's internal files the similar way or the only way for this is to put everything into the asset folder of the client or going with the relative path hack?
This is work in progress:
prepare a Dart app for server-side deployment
To improve the development experience you may use a symlink as a workaround so that you have the client files available in a directory of the server package.
I suggest creating a feature request at http://www.dartbug.com/new for better support.
I would go for two separate projects.
You won't need to make the client package a dependency on the server package.
The server only needs to know where the directory with the build output of the client package is.
Which files to serve is usually requested by the client.
The client requests e.g. index.html and all further dependencies (.dart, .hmtl, .js, .img, .css, ...) are hard-coded in this file and therefore the server should not need to know any further details beforehand.
I'd suggest organising two separate projects. There are a few things that you might profit from if you use this approach. The most obvious there's no coupling between client and server, you get a very clear separation. The other one is that your server can evolve independently of the client. Dart applications will need to be compiled to javascript. In the end you will have a dart server app serving javascript files (+ maybe dart files if you decide to do so). Some of the packages that you use on the server side are not available in dartium - you don't want to have to deal with this dependency mess. Your server might consist of more then just one app, maybe your server will have a module in java or some other language. Keeping this two project separately gives you a lot more flexibility.
I have successfully set up an API using ASP.NET MVC 4 on IIS6 (I used Phil's tutorial). When testing, we had it as the "Default website" and so there was no conflict with anything else. I am now being asked to set this up within a FOLDER of an existing website (the existing website is in ASP 1.0...and I cannot modify this...so I would some sort of virtual...something?). So basically, if we have https://www.ourcompany.com, they want the API to be available through https://www.ourcompany.com/api/.
Is this even possible? Phil's tutorial talks about setting up a Virtual Application, but I don't have that option in IIS (and if I had, I'm not knowledgeable enough about IIS to know if that would even allow me to access the API that way). I don't want anything that I set up to mess up the current website either, and there are a couple steps in the tutorial that I'll freely admit I don't fully understand.
If your curious as to WHY, the only advantage (besides being "neat") is so that the same SSL Cert can be used.
Yes that's definately possible at my work we had a similar setup, IIS6, a .NET 3.5 web, with a .NET 4.0 web nested underneath.
You would just set it up as a virtual directory underneath the parent website, point it to your folder, and ensure the value for the "Execute Permissions" dropdown is "Scripts Only" or above, and the correct .NET framework version selected on the ASP.NET tab.
There may be additional values you may need to over-write in your child web.config file, or, alternatively, wrap the entire parent web config with a "Location" attribute.
Forgot to mention, you may need to add manual script mappings for the child web if it doesn't work by default. (This installs the .NET 4.0 script mappings to a specific web) though again not sure if this is required by default. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k6h9cz8h.aspx
One more thing - If you're using REST (or an extension less URL mapping which I believe an MVC 4 web will use) - You'll need to add a "wild card" script mapping, which basically tells IIS to serve requests with no extension with the .NET 4.0 framework - See here However where they're referencing .NET 2.0 folders, you'll obviously want to reference the same files but in the .NET 4.0 folders :)
Thanks