What have your ASP.Net MVC deployment experiences been?

Question

I've been waging a bit of a battle with MVC recently, trying to get it deployed and working correctly on my web host server. While the host (ixwebhosting) has been very prompt and efficient at resolving some of the technical difficulties, I'm still encountering odd behaviours around getting the views to render.

Specific issues I've struck so far are the application not being recognised at all (returning 404) and individual views returning 404s.

Is this typical of other peoples' experience when trying to deploy to a hosted environment or am I just a bit green in this department?

Should I consider falling back to web forms until MVC matures a bit more?

Answer 1

Are there specific issues you are having?

My personal experience: an ISP that can't support 301 redirects under ASP.NET MVC. But that's not MVC's fault; the ISP just hasn't caught up yet. They are still running IIS6, and ASP.NET MVC is better (less problematic) under IIS7.

MVC 1.0 is stable and mature enough for production applications. I also use elements from MVCContrib (i.e. RenderAction) without problems.

Answer 2

I clicked the Publish option and waited until the site got uploaded via FTP. After that everything worked fine.

Answer 3

I recently hosted on GoDaddy w/out (any) issues at all! I simply published the site and uploaded it via FileZilla.

I even have a DB and that was no issues what so ever.

Answer 4

(...) views returning 404s (...)

Actually, some of the problems you've been having may be related to some confusions you are having regarding MVC on the web. For example, a View in web MVC is a presentational unit handed back by the controller to the client. The same View can be used for many resources and action methods. These action methods, in turn, can also return 404s. The ASP.NET MVC tutorials on ASP.NET are good starting points for getting to know MVC.

I thought getting ASP.NET MVC to run on IIS6 would be a hassle, but I had zero problems after following the normal installation guidelines. Even special cases where IIS is involved (caching, redirecting, static content etc) has worked fine on IIS6. On IIS7, of course, there are no issues.

Answer 5

ASP.Net MVC is an extension to the .net framework, it is a separate install (at least until .net 4.0).

• Does your hosting environment have ASP.Net MVC installed?

It could also be that you are having problems with the routing, therefore a URL is giving a 404 (file not found), because it cannot match a route to the url.

• Are the URL's different in your hosting environment?