Adding MVC to a ASP.NET Website

Question

I'd like to add MVC support to an existing Website project (not a Web application project) and have a few questions.

1. To get Visual Studio's MVC goodness, it appears that I need to update the .csproj file's <ProjectTypeGuids> node. There is no csproj file in a website project.
2. It appears that I need to create Models and Controllers folder in the App_Code. Is this true? I prefer having these folders under root.
3. For Views should I be creating a aspx and aspx.cs files? Is cshtml razor files supported in this kind of a setup?

Any other responses are appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

With asp.net MVC2 and above, the MVC team separated the core functionality into three different assemblies, each of which extends from the common System.Web assembly:

• System.Web.Routing
• System.Web.Abstractions
• System.Web.Mvc

With this seperation, they went ahead and made the assemblies to "work in Medium-trust server enviroments and be bin-deployable".

One of the good things about this featuere is, you don't have to have a specific project type to run MVC. You only need the assemblies, some directories and a tweaked web.config.

To do this, you need only to place the assemblies in your local bin folder of your project and make the necessary references for those assemblies. Once this is done, you have access to asp.net MVC.

Here are some detailed instructions from the Wrox Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book which should help you get started:

Including MVC in Existing Web Forms Applications

Adding ASP.NET MVC functionality to an existing Web Forms application is comprised of three different steps:

1. Add a reference to the three core libraries that ASP.NET MVC needs: System.Web.Mvc, System.Web.Routing, and System.Web.Abstractions.

2. Add two directories to your application: Controllers and Views.

3. Update the Web.config to load the three assemblies at run time as well as registering the UrlRoutingModule HttpModule.

For reference, here are a couple of blogs/sites which have some more detailed scenarios which might help you out:

Mixing ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC in Harmony

Good luck, and hope this helps you out some.