Get Started with Amazon EC2, Run Your .NET MVC3 (Razor) Site in the Cloud with Linux Mono

I’ve recently been getting pretty excited about Amazon EC2 once I realized you can setup a micro linux server for free to learn and test out their services. I know, a couple years behind the curve right? I’ve just never really looked into it. Now that I’m familiarizing myself with the whole cloud concept with Amazon, it’s really cool to think of small business growth potential in the web market without the restraint of building a heavy infrastructure upfront. I realize after reading some other articles that in the long run, it is probably more expensive than hosting your own solution. But as a startup, it still seems to me that it’s a pretty good deal at least for short term events or just taking their infrastructure out for a spin to test some ideas. Pay for what you use; that’s Amazon’s big pitch with their Amazon Web Services (AWS).

So if you want to play around with AWS for free, you have to roll Linux. If you want to host ASP.NET MVC3 on AWS Linux, there’s a few steps you need to take. For this post, I’ll talk about some of the AWS services that can get you started along with how to install and configure your environment for hosting ASP.NET MVC3 applications with Linux and Mono.

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Running Mono MVC3 Razor and Solving the InvalidOperationException of ‘The view ‘name’ or its master was not found’

I’ve been fighting my system the past day or so trying to figure out why all the views in one of my controllers return this silly exception. The file indeed exists. Permissions are correct. Other controller views works. Other non-view (like json or file content) actions work within this controller. This works on Windows but not in Mono. Why doesn’t it work? To find this, I ended up using my source control to identify the commit that caused the break. Then line by line, I started toggling the changes within that commit until I found it.

System.InvalidOperationException: The view ‘Index’ or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations. The following locations were searched: ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Dashboard/Index.aspx ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Dashboard/Index.ascx ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Shared/Index.aspx ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Shared/Index.ascx ~/Views/Dashboard/Index.aspx ~/Views/Dashboard/Index.ascx ~/Views/Shared/Index.aspx ~/Views/Shared/Index.ascx ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Dashboard/Index.cshtml ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Dashboard/Index.vbhtml ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Shared/Index.cshtml ~/Areas/Manage/Views/Shared/Index.vbhtml ~/Views/Dashboard/Index.cshtml ~/Views/Dashboard/Index.vbhtml ~/Views/Shared/Index.cshtml ~/Views/Shared/Index.vbhtml

I’m saying this purely by observation. But MVC3 (or maybe the Mono runtime) seems to group compiled view code by controller. I was able to figure out that ALL ViewResult actions failed under this specific controller. It turns out I had one character out of place in my Razor syntax. With that one syntactical flaw, all the views under that controller could not compile and the only reasonable exception that could be thrown was the one above. The windows runtime seems to ignore this (maybe because it compiles them individually; I don’t know). In my case, I was trying to render one view when another view was causing the problem.

So if you see this exception and everything seems to be correct, start sifting through your recent View changes to see if anything you did broke the view syntax. So you can get a little laugh, here’s my goof up:

The indicated ‘@’ symbol is not necessary when continuing additional statements.

Enjoy!

Get MVC3 Razor Running on Mono

Updated 10-18-2011 – added some more common issues

I dug around a little to figure this out. Hopefully this will clarify all the steps required to get an MVC 3 Razor site running on Mono. The main pitfall I ran into was gathering the additional dependencies and excluding Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure assembly from my deployment. Overall though it’s not too difficult to deploy your MVC3 app.

In Summary:

1. Install Mono
2. BIN Deploy Website
3. Configure Apache (or Xsp environment)
4. Fire Up Your Server
5. Errors You Might See

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Setting up Mono 2.8 with Asp.Net 4.0 and MVC2 on Ubuntu with MySql Membership

I’ve had a few requests to write a full walk-through installing Mono 2.8 w/ Asp.Net 4.0 since I posted an install script for Mono 2.8 on Ubuntu and Fedora.  So here it is! We’re going to be setting up a new server from scratch then installing just the basics of Mono 2.8 (Mono, GTK, GDI, XSP, & Mod_Mono). Then we’ll use that to setup a new Apache server with a basic Asp.Net 4.0 MVC2 application w/ MySql Membership.  That sounds like a lot, but it’s really very straight forward. So lets get started!

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Cross-domain JsonP using Asp.net MVC and jQuery

So there are a couple great walkthroughs out there that talk about using jquery jsonp in cross-domain scenarios.  They talk a lot about the requesting and server side, but not so much about how to use the callback. So to clarify, I’ll step through what I did to make this work including providing my implementation for a new ActionResult called JsonPResult for MVC.

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MVC2 on Mono – Tips and Tricks for Windows Developers

So lately, I’ve been pretty wrapped up with kids and family so I haven’t had much time to post anything new.  However, I did start a new project, which I’ll detail out more as I go. It’s been quite the experience so far since I decided to build this one from the ground up using MySql and Linux/Mono.  I’ve never designed apps like that before. For one, I’ve had to learn a new set of design tools for MySql as opposed to my comfortable Sql Management Studio. And I’ve also had to very incrementally test different programming technologies and methods that were questionably supported in Linux/Mono.  The beauty of this is that no matter what I do to make it work for Mono, the app will always work on Windows, and there’s little development time lost if I have to fall back to its native platform.

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How to Setup and Configure MySql Membership Provider 6.2.2 – Porting to Mono Part 2 of 3

As the second part of this series, I’ll look at building a website that can use the MySql Membership Provider. This is one of the main hang-ups I’ve run into while porting one of my ASP.NET applications to Mono. With the latest MySql Connector, this turns out to be a very easy thing to do. It’s nearly as simple as setting up your web.config with the correct parameters and getting the right connector version.

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Using jQuery Modal Dialog Confirmation with an ASP.NET Server Control

So the other day, I wanted to build a confirmation dialog using jQuery with an existing Asp.Net web forms Button control.  I wanted this dialog to be modal; and upon confirmation, I wanted it to postback using the Button’s server-side click event.  After toying with the jQuery dialog, I realized that its dialog doesn’t suspend the process while waiting for user input. So it also causes problems with confirmation since clicking the original button will always postback. So with a few tweaks, you can prevent the postback and emulate the click event pretty easily.

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Announcing SiteManager – A Simple Open Source, MVC Based CMS

While playing and learning with MVC, I designed a simple little CMS (content management system). My goals for the project were to keep it simple, use MVC, and make it SEO optimized as possible. Well finally the first version of that application is published on CodePlex. Feel free to go check it out. Don’t forget to peek at the setup documentation.

Connecting to Sql Server using Impersonation from Asp.Net

So you have an Asp.Net application that needs to authenticate its users to Active Directory, and you also want to use their credentials for connecting to a database server. It’s pretty logical thing to do in an enterprise environment where you would normally control all your user privileges using Active Directory. This is especially nice since you also don’t have to put sensitive credentials in your web.config file.

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