ASP.NET MVC - Is it even possible to have multiple MVC projects on the same server??

Question

I'm having so many problems getting more than 1 MVC project up and running on the same server... I'm using a Windows XP system running the default IIS (5.1 I believe).

At this moment I'm even building WebSetup projects for every project I create to make sure everything goes well, while these projects could very easily be deployed using XCopy.

Bottom line, I can get a MVC project (e.g. ContactManager example) running at: http://servername, OR http://servername/ContactManager. But as soon as I have a project at both locations the horror starts

"title is not a member of ViewPage" -> yeah, right...
Section or group name 'system.web.extensions' is already defined. -> sure 
let me <clear /> or <remove /> that one, oh that's not valid... 

Is it even possible to have more than 1 ASP.NET MVC project (application) running on the same Windows XP machine?

http://server/       Root project  (MVC)
http://server/app1   Application 1 (MVC)
http://server/app2   Application 2 (MVC)
http://server/appX   Application X (MVC)

Can somebody name some points of attention or something?

Answer 1

IIS5.1 that comes with XP only supports one web site (but multiple virtual directories). This i believe will be your limiting factor.

IIS6.x and above where you have many web sites (and many application pools) is preferred when trying to get multiple MVC apps on the same server.

EDIT You could always use the free version of VMware Server and just create heaps of VMs with XP for testing/development.

Answer 2

are there 2 separate application defined in IIS?

Answer 3

On XP, a solution would be to use an Apache server with Mono 2.4. It works very well with ASP.NET MVC, and even with SQL Server (<= 2005). Hopefully, one day, we'll see this packaged with some future version of Xamp or EasyPHP :) That will enable everybody who is curious to give it a try.

Answer 4

Ensure that the root folder of each application, in IIS manager, is set to be a different web application.

Answer 5

Yes this is possible. I have 3 MVC applications running under 1 main MVC application.

- Main site
           - Administration
           - Sub App 2
           - ...

However, you need to check the following details.

1. check the main and sub applications are all setup to use the wildcard mapping for MVC with aspnet_isapi.dll.

2. due to inheritance of web.configs you need to set a property in your root MVC application... wrap this around your < system.web >

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
   <system.web>...
</location>

Answer 6

Is it even possible to have more than 1 ASP.NET MVC project (application), running on the same Windows XP machine?

Yes, it is absolutely possible to have more than 1 ASP.NET MVC application at same Windows XP machine. I've just created two new ASP.NET MVC applications on my test machine running fresh Windows XP SP3 and they works smoothly.

UPDATED:

I've just created 3d application:

• IIS root path changed to that application
• Added mapping .* to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll.
• Checked anonymous access

Still all 3 applications works very well

UPDATED:

There is one issue with mapping .* to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll at the server root: all your not-MVC plain ASP.NET applications will stop working.

Home this helps

Answer 7

I came across this post that should give you an easy and clean way to do it (with subdomains): http://blogs.securancy.com/post/ASPNET-MVC-Subdomain-Routing.aspx