Create EXE from MVC Application

Question

I have created a Game Application using MVC 3 Web Application which is like this

Answer 1

Not directly.

What you can do is use mono xsp to have a simple embedded webserver, which you can put into a .exe, which will then start a webserver on port xy, and open a web-browser with with

http://localhost:xy/optional-virtual-directory/Home/Game

you also need to localcopy that webserver-assembly to your web-app's /bin directory for it to work without any installation.

You'll also need to localcopy all necessary ASP.NET MVC-3 assemblies (because they are most-likely not installed by default).
And you need to add version 1.0.0 just in case somebody has installed MVC-4 locally.

And even then, it requires .NET framework 4.0 (or at least 3.5?) installed on the target computer.

Here a link to the latest stable-XSP sources:
http://download.mono-project.com/sources/xsp/xsp-2.10.2.tar.bz2

You can include the zipped web application as embedded resource and use a unzip-library to unzip it to a writeable directory, which you set as your webserver's root directory.

Make sure your unzip-library does properly unpack JavaScript files, because the microsoft-supplied windows-server windows-explorer-integrated-zip-handling utility does not properly unpack them (may depend on server version and security settings/policy).

static void Main()
{

    int iPort = 8080; // If admin rights it requires, wrong it is ;)
    iPort = 30080; // Damn !  I still no haz no admin rightz !


    string strBasePath = @"D:\UserName\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\EmbeddableWebServer\TestApplication";

    string strCurrentDirectory = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);
    System.IO.DirectoryInfo di = new System.IO.DirectoryInfo(strCurrentDirectory);
    //strBasePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(di.Parent.Parent.Parent.FullName, "TestApplication");
    strBasePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(di.Parent.Parent.Parent.FullName, "TestMvcApplication");

    //EmbeddableWebServer.cWebSource WebSource = new EmbeddableWebServer.cWebSource(System.Net.IPAddress.Any, iPort);
    Mono.WebServer.XSPWebSource ws = new Mono.WebServer.XSPWebSource(System.Net.IPAddress.Any, iPort);

    // EmbeddableWebServer.cServer Server = new EmbeddableWebServer.cServer(WebSource, strBasePath);
    Mono.WebServer.ApplicationServer Server = new Mono.WebServer.ApplicationServer(ws, strBasePath);

    Server.AddApplication("localhost", iPort, "/", strBasePath);
    Server.Start(true);


    System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("\"http://localhost:" + iPort.ToString() + "\"");

    Console.WriteLine(" --- Server up and running. Press any key to quit --- ");
    Console.ReadKey();

    Server.Stop();
} // End Sub Main 

I used this code to get around the missing locale-handling.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;


namespace System
{


    public class Locale
    {
        // http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/441722ys(v=vs.80).aspx
        // #pragma warning disable 414, 3021

        public static string GetText(string message)
        {
            return message;
        }


        public static string GetText(string format, params object[] args)
        {
            return string.Format(format, args);
        }


        /*
        public static object GetResource(string name)
        {
            return name;
        }
        */


    } // End Class Locale


} // End Namespace System

---

2019 Update:

As per end-2019, you can use .NET Core 3.1, that way you can build a self-contained application, which the user can run without having .NET framework installed at all.

To build a self-contained .NET Core Application for x86 and x64:

dotnet restore -r win-x86
dotnet build -r win-x86
dotnet publish -f netcoreapp3.1 -c Release -r win-x86

Kestrel is an integrated web-server which you can use instead of Mono.XSP.
With that, you can run your MVC/.NET-Core Web-Application on port xy (where xy is an unused port-number), and start a web-browser on http(s)://localhost:xy