Best way to gradually convert an existing ASP.NET site to MVC

Question

Please keep in mind that this is new for me and I might have missed something important.

I have an existing website, based on an ASP.NET web application. I am now using ASP.NET MVC for new development, and intend to gradually replace the bulk of the pages with MVC based pages.

I have two issues here:

1) I need to replace the pages gradually, because I cannot convert everything at once. 2) Existing URLs (of physical files) should be preserved if possible.

The way I see it, I have the following options:

1) Create a brand new MVC web application in the root of the web site, and then include existing HTML/ASPX/ASMX/... pages to that. This way, the routes are always relative to the root of the web site.

2) Modify the existing Global.asax, Web.config, Default.aspx (and so on) to switch the MVC handler on for routing, and then publish my MVC application to a subfolder.

What is the easiest way to do that, and am I missing something?

Thanks, Laurent

Answer 1

Like you, I'm tackling this same problem. A few things I ran into I've posted about here https://stackoverflow.com/users/84825/mouffette and they are mainly related to SETUP. The best thing to do is start a new MVC project and compare the files and structure to your existing ASP.NET application. When in doubt just move over line by line and web.config's and eventually you'll get it ;-)

Once you have the plumbing working you then can focus on MVC and it just works side by side.

These links have also helped:

http://media.wiley.com/assets/1539/15/professionalaspnet35mvc_chapter13.pdf http://aspnetmvcbook.s3.amazonaws.com/aspnetmvc-nerdinner_v1.pdf

and you've already found the best site...stackoverflow.