Developing For .NET

Last week, I finally got the ball rolling on our IIS server. With a little help from a friend, I managed to get the SSL Certificate installed. A quick tutorial, and the site was moved to the server but it would not respond. Monday, I managed to get the site to respond by installing the .NET 3.5 framework on the server and I mistakenly thought it was up and running, so I released it to the beta testers. Of course, immediately the testers informed me that only the home page was showing, while all other links returned a 404 message.

I went through several efforts and can now happily say that it does work, so I am officially saying it is deployed. It is far from finished, but it is live on the web (sorry, I can’t share the address at this time). Here are the steps I followed that got it running:

1. Install .Net Framework 3.5 on IIS Server
2. Change Route URLs in Global.aspx.cs to include the .mvc extension (this is in the comments for that file)
3. Install ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 on the IIS Server.
4. Add an ISAPI extension to the application for .mvc that points to “c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll”.
5. Uncheck the “Verify that file exists” box on the Extensions configuration dialog.

The last one is what finally made all the pieces fall into place. I don’t know if it is a “DUH” sort of a thing, but you have to remember that I am not an IIS or ASP.NET guy.

I found information on all but the last entry scattered across the web. Hopefully by putting them all in one place it will help some poor wayward soul in the future. According to those resources, these steps should also work for IIS7 in classic mode (integration mode? are those the same?) but should be unnecessary in the default IIS7 configuration.

At any rate, it lives!