Add ASP.NET MVC Area to ASP.NET Web Forms existing project

Question

I have a website developed in ASP.NET Web Forms with .NET FrameWork 4.5.1

We have a requirement to build a replica of the site for mobile devices (responsive doesn't work for us in this case) so I ended up thinking of doind this part of the site with ASP.NET MVC.

Note before you continue: I know there are a few questions answered about this topic and in the web there are some articles on how to mix them. But none of them works for me because I'm trying to use the One ASP.NET Framework to avoid going through a lot of manual work.

So, what I did was:

1. Add the Nuget Package for MVC in my ASP.NET WebForms project
2. Once added, I configured an MVC Area to contain my Mobile site in MVC

The project structure looks like this:

And here comes my problem: If I run any of the ASPX pages, they run ok. When I go to the /Mobile/Home/Index it says the resource is not found. I suspect this is because the App_Start folder doesn't exists in my project and Starup.cs isn't there either so the website doesn't know anything about MVC routing.

Question

1. How can I add the App_Start folder and the Starup.cs with defaults values without suffering the process (avoiding copy/paste or manual processes)?

2. How can I make this both (web type projects) live together as they say it can be done with the One ASP.NET Framework?.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You'll need to register the areas in your Global.asax (add it through the Add Item menu option if it does not exist):

public class Global : HttpApplication
{

    protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

    }

}

This will enable the link to your Mobile @ localhost/{ProjectName}/Mobile/Home