ASP.Net MVC requirements vs ASP.Net? (hosting question, plus LINQ-to-SQL question)

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm jumping into ASP.Net MVC and wanted to know how tough it's been for hosting providers to support it.

One thing that I'd like to know is how I can port my local MVC app to a hosted provider if I'm using LINQ to SQL. I assume I have to move the dbml files over in some way? What else that's special in contrast to a regular ASP.Net app? (Sorry if this is a complete newbie question, I'm trying to get a feel for the steps involved.)

Can anyone give their opinion on how quickly providers are adding support for ASP.Net MVC? I'd also like to know if it's going to be a Big Deal and get future support and love from Microsoft or if it's being thought of at Redmond as an experiment compared with webforms, subject to being pulled without notice. I ask this one because I'm seeing a lot of jobs on the usual boards involving Spring, Hibernate & J2EE, and a comparative lack of ASP.Net (much less ASP.Net MVC) offerings and wonder if this tide will turn at some point. (Feel free to disagree with me on the number of jobs involving J2EE & LAMP vs ASP.Net, but that's my observation.)

Answer 1

ASP.NET MVC is fully supported by Microsoft as a first-class part of .NET, equal to ASP.NET WebForms. It is part of the core framework as of version 3.5 SP1. Most of the major hosting providers (such as GoDaddy) already offer MVC support OOTB.

As far as moving LINQ to SQL - just move your DBML (and associated designer file), and make sure to get the connection string info from the web.config.

Answer 2

Biggest deployment issue with MVC is the server support for URL Routing. If the server is 2008 or supports IIS7, you should be good. However, if your server is only IIS6 (Server 2003), you may need to make some changes to your URL Routing scheme. There are a number of examples online to help with this deployment option. See http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/26/asp.net-mvc-on-iis-6-walkthrough.aspx as an example.

Jim Wooley www.ThinqLinq.com (MVC Application hosted on DotNetPark using Server 2003 and IIS 6)