Mixing ASP.NET MVC into ASP.NET WebForms

Question

For some reason my routing is ignoring any attempt to access my MVC pages and simply giving me 404s. I have a WebForms app set up like the following:

Virtual Directory: thing

So I usually access my site like so:

• http://localhost/thing/someFile.aspx
• http://localhost/thing/someFolder/anotherFile.aspx

The original stucture of my ASP.NET WebForms app mirrors the file system so I have folders full of .aspx files and I need to be able to use them like that. For some reason when I try to access a page using the MVC routing such as:

• http://localhost/thing/Home/Index

I just get a 404 error. I have used ASP.NET MVC on it's own and I know that even if I didn't set up my folders properly, I wouldn't get a 404. I would get the reasons why the page couldn't be found and hints to where the files should be. Below is my routing info. Where am I going wrong?

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.aspx/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.MapRoute(
       "Default",
        // Route name
       "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
        // URL with parameters
       new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
        // Parameter defaults
     );
}

protected void Application_Start()
{
    RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}

Answer 1

Can you tell me what OS you're running on and whether this site is running under VS.NET Web Dev server or IIS?

Routing in MVC directs a request to a Controller class and then a specific Action method. Do you have a class named HomeController with a method named Index?

Assuming you had a controller that looked this this...

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View();
    }
}

... then the url you mentioned should work. However, ASP.NET MVC will expect to find any views associated with the Home controller in a folder named Views\Home or Views\Shared under your vdir. In this case, for the Index action, it will expect to find a view named Index.aspx (or .ascx). However, a missing view doesn't usually result in 404 - that's usually caused by the controller not being found, the action method not being found, or on IIS 6 the asp.net pipeline not being in the wildcard settings for the vdir.

update:

Are you sure your web.config has the MVC HttpHandler in place (so that MVC is in the ASP.NET pipeline). You should have something like this...

<add verb="*" path="*.mvc" validate="false" type="System.Web.Mvc.MvcHttpHandler, System.Web.Mvc, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>

... in your httpHandlers section and this...

<add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule, System.Web.Routing, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>

... in your 'httpModules' section of web.config.

update 2:

Based upon your comments I suspect you've not got the ASP.NET MVC code in the pipeline. You should take your web.config and compare it with one from a freshly created MVC site and look for the missing config items. I've suggested a couple above, but there might be more.