Can I use ASP.NET Web Pages without deploying the "bin" folder?

Question

I am creating a very simple site that was originally just a bunch of HTML / CSS files. Then I needed to add a little bit of server-side logic so I thought I'd use ASP.NET Web Pages as they sound like a suitable solution.

So I changed index.html to index.cshtml, added the code I needed and I though that would be it (I also added this basic web.config file:

<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />
  </system.web>
</configuration>

However, launching this on local IIS Express yielded this error:

Could not determine which version of ASP.NET Web Pages to use.

In order to use this site, specify a version in the site’s web.config file. For more information, see the following article on the Microsoft support site: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254126

So I added this to my web.config:

<appSettings >
    <add key="webPages:Version" value="2.0" />
</appSettings >

Now the site starts but handles UTF-8 really weirdly - although all the HTTP headers, file encodings and meta tags are correctly set to UTF-8, my national characters display incorrectly. I found this question: Do I need web.config for non-ASCII characters? but it didn't really solve my problem.

I though, what can be wrong with my setup? When I create a new site in WebMatrix and copy my files over to it, it all works fine, even without specifying the Web Pages version in web.config. And the only difference I can see is the presence of bin folder in the WebMatrix-generated project.

So the question is, do I need to have the bin folder as part of my source files too? I don't really feel like checking 1.5MB worth of binary files into Git should be necessary just to add one dynamic line in my index.cshtml but maybe that's how it is?

Thanks for either confirming this or showing me some better way.

Answer 1

ASP.NET WebPages requires a BOM on UTF-8 pages or it won't read the page as UTF-8. And if it doesn't do that, it won't output a UTF-8 encoded page.

This isn't an ASP.NET issue, but rather a WebPages issue. WebPages processes the real page, and it doesn't interpret the html to know that it should be UTF-8. The only way it knows is by looking for a BOM.