No ASP.NET MVC 5 Web Application Template on VS 2012?

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and have just installed "Microsoft ASP.NET and Web Frameworks 2013.1 - Visual Studio".

As expected, it added the option to create an "ASP.NET MVC 5 Empty Project". The thing is, I see no way of jump-starting an already functional "base application" as I had when I was using MVC 4 (e.g. "Asp.NET MVC 4 Web Application"). I only see an empty template.

I've seen answers such as:

• How can I add the MVC 5 project template to VS 2012?

• Create and Run MVC 5 Project in VS 2012

• Direct download link to ASP.NET MVC 5 for VS 2012

And found this article on the matter.

This is obviously not a show-stopper as I can always create the application from a scratch, but I still would like to know if it is possible to achieve that on VS 2012. Did I miss a step, or do I need VS 2013 for that? A fully functional Web application template (with authentication etc.) would be nice to dabble around MVC 5's new features or for prototyping.

Answer 1

After creating a new project using ASP.NET MVC 5 Empty Project, you can right click on the project, then click Add.. > New Scaffolded Item..., select MVC on the left, then MVC 5 Dependencies and choose Full dependencies from the prompt.

This will add a default layout (Views\Shared\_Layout.cshtml), Content folder, Scripts folder with bootstrap, jquery, modernizr, etc, and other things the Web Application template creates.

If you get the error "CS0103: The name 'Styles' does not exist in the current context" just add <add namespace="System.Web.Optimization"/> under <namespaces> in Views/web.config