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!

July 2011 – My Application Tool Belt for .NET Web Applications

I really like to talk about tools I use to the people I work with. I especially like to push tools into environments where I think could be an improvement to their work flow.  So here it is, my current tool belt. I primarily focus on web applications, so there’s a bias toward those tools.

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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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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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Walkthrough: Porting Asp.Net MVC Website to Mono 2.6.1 and MySql on Linux Apache – Porting to Mono Part 3 of 3

So for the third and final part of this series, I want to walk through how I ported a very small project I posted on CodePlex awhile back called SiteManager. It is an extremely simplified CMS application that I wrote using Linq to Sql and MVC in order to provide a very basic and easy website tool. It uses membership provider for authentication and Linq to Sql Classes with its database in MS Sql Server. For this walkthrough, I’ll be converting the database to MySql and adapting Linq to Sql to Dblinq so it can completely run on Mono and Linux.

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Installing OpenSuse 11.2 with Mono 2.6.1 and Apache Using Text Mode Configuration – Porting to Mono Part 1 of 3

I’ve always kept an eye on the Mono project, mostly out of curiosity and intrigue. The last time I played around with Mono it was at version 2.0, and at the time I didn’t really spend a lot of time on it because it didn’t support some of the things I was using.  Well recently, I regained interest in Mono when I saw it now supports MVC and some of Dblinq. And since I’ve been buzzing on the whole MVC thing for awhile, I decided to check Mono out for myself and start a fun little porting project. So this is the first part of a three part series describing everything I did to get a server up and running and one of my Asp.Net MVC applications ported to Mono.

This first part will cover installing and configuring an OpenSuse 11.2 server with Apache/Mono and SSH. The second part will talk about how to setup a MySql Membership provider (with mono and Windows), and the third part is a walkthrough showing how to port a simple Asp.Net MVC site to mono and MySql. I’m also targeting those of you who use virtual hosting where you might only have SSH (after install) to configure your server, so I will be using text based tools: SSH, vi, and yast for all my installations and configuration after getting the base system installed.

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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.