How do I deploy an ASP.NET MVC3 Application?

Question

I have created a web application using ASP.NET MVC3 in Visual studio (no SQL Server). Now I want to deploy it and am looking for suggestions for the easiest possible way.

Answer 1

When you run application in Visual Studio 2010 with .net framework 4 and MVC 3 installed on your machine the following folders are automatically created:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC 3

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages.

These folders also contain an “Assemblies” folder.

ASP.NET MVC references following additional assemblies:

System.Web.Mvc
Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure
System.Web.Razor
System.Web.WebPages
System.Web.WebPages.Razor

To deploy your application on shared server with no support from your hosting company you can simply copy these DLL files and paste them to your BIN folder.

Make DLLs local while publishing:

If you don’t want to copy these files manually or don’t have permissions to copy and paste these files you can use this method.

The DLL files mentioned in the manual method can be included in the Bin folder when you publish your project to a production.

To include them to the Bin folder, go to your MVC application project and expand the ‘References’ node in project tree. Select above assemblies then right click and select ‘Properties’ and change ‘Local Copy’ to True as it is False by default. If Local Copy attribute is set to TRUE then selected DLL will be included in ‘Bin’ folder when you publish your project.