ASP.NET MVC alongside Web Forms in the same web app?

Question

Has anyone successfully deployed ASP.NET MVC alongside Web Forms in the same application in a production environment? Were there any conflicts or gotchas you faced while doi

Answer 1

I've spent a lot of time over the past few months on this. Here are my observations.

The good/easy - Getting Webforms to call into MVC controllers - It was remarkably easy to stand up a new MVC3 project and drop Webforms pages into it. - I was able to move my section into the /pages directory in a new web.config there

The dirty/difficult

• Regarding the GUID

  • Please note that the GUID has to be added at the front of the line for some reason... everytime I tried it failed. Until I stumbled on a post that insisted it be the before the others.
  • also I don't know what the difference is but I have a different GUID working... {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401}

• getting the landing page to be Webforms caused ALL kinds of snags.

• getting jQuery intellisense to play nicely with T4MVC

this is what I did to address that

@if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    { 
     @* intellisense! *@
     @Html.RelativeJavascript(Links.Scripts.Mvc3.jquery_1_7_js)
     @Html.RelativeJavascript(Links.Scripts.Mvc3.jquery_unobtrusive_ajax_js)
    }
    else
    {
        @Html.RelativeJavascript(Links.Scripts.Mvc3.jquery_1_7_min_js) 
        @Html.RelativeJavascript(Links.Scripts.Mvc3.jquery_unobtrusive_ajax_min_js)  
    }

Recommendations:

• Use T4MVC in ALL cases even if you are pure webforms. The elimination of magic strings for static content (.js,.css, images, specifying templates) is outstanding.
  • and if you have any part of your build process compiling views then you get compile-time safety on any of those links.