ASP.Net MVC on Blacknight

Update: SP1 is now installed for ASP.Net 3.5. So now the only DLL you need to upload is 'System.Web.Mvc.dll'.

I was reading a little bit about the new ASP.Net MVC stuff. I think it would be ideal for my Tadmap (image hosting) project. Before I started any major development re-work I needed to check that my hosting provider, Blacknight, could host it.

So I uploaded the sample MVC application. Of course it didn't work at first but I don't give up that easily and it is now up and running. I think the following steps will work for anybody else trying the same.

As Blacknight do not have SP1 installed for ASP.Net 3.5 you have to upload the new DLLs when you deploy. Simple instructions can be found here, Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC.

My windows account on Blacknight is using IIS 6.0 which does not automatically support MVC. In order to handle URLs the MVC way you will need to follow the instructions here, ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough. Basically, you just need to grab the code for the Global.asax.cs file and add a '.mvc' file mapping using your Blacknight control panel.

To add the file mapping, just go to the 'Web' tab of your domain and add 'mvc' to the ASP.Net 2 mappings. It should look like the image below and make sure that 'Script Engine' is 'On' and 'Verify File Exists' is 'Off'.

One small (cosmetic) problem is that the URLs aren't as clean as they should be because the 'mvc' extension is needed. So the URL for the About action of the Home controller that should look like 'http://trevorpower.com/Home/About' instead looks like 'http://trevorpower.com/Home.mvc/About'. I have seen solutions to this problem as well but that's for another day. Right now I have the not so small task of converting an existing ASP.Net application to an ASP.Net MVC application.