Today I've finally had time to have a closer look at ASP.NET MVC, getting my hands dirty and actually doing something with it. I have vacation and the kids are at day care - so this was my chance!
I started up downloading the Visual Web Developer Express 2010 and created an ASP.NET MVC 2 template project. I executed it on the development web server, saw it worked, changed a couple of texts and reloaded to see my changes were applied. They were!
Then I googled to see if my web host, Binero, had support for ASP.NET MVC at all. I found that they had a blog entry with an instructional movie showing exactly how to make it work, so it shouldn't be a problem I figured.
I followed the instructions and uploaded my modified template site. It turned out the template site is using .NET 4.0 though, which Binero doesn't support, so it didn't work out of the box. Changing target version for the project to .NET 3.5 should do the trick I figured, so I did that and tried to run the project - and got some strange error. The page said Error CS1525 about a line in the View where the code was something about "Html.ActionLink". Google didn't quite help me, but pretty soon I noticed the obvious problem. It was marked "<%:" which is new in ASP.NET 4. Changing all "<%:" in the views to "<%=" made it work with the .NET 3.5 framework and I was back in game!
Playing around adding my own models, views and controllers was all pretty straight forward. Nowhere near as much magic as I had expected. I got a hold of it pretty fast and only had one thing stopping me so much I had to go googling again. Adding " - MySite" after the ContentPlaceHolder inside the title-element was not doing the trick for some reason.
<title><asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /> - MySite</title>
All I got in the title was the content from the placeholder... I first thought it was some update problem and started recompiling, reloading, refreshing, re-everything, but no luck. Finally I went to google who could help me instantly. It has to do with the head-tag having runat="server" set. Full description and solution can be found here: TipJar: Title Tags and Master Pages
A couple of hours resulted in a very simple web site, but never the less a ASP.NET MVC web site.
My first!
