Deploying An ASP.Net MVC Web Application To IIS7

The next installment in my exciting series where I capture what I know about deploying Dovetail Mobile Agent which could be boiled down to How To Be a Web Server Administrator in the year 2008. Moving from IIS6 this time we take a look at getting an ASP.Net MVC application deployed to IIS7. Thankfully this is pretty easy.

To try out this experience I created a Vista SP1 Enterprise virtual machine and added the IIS 7 windows feature. I know. I know. Most enterprise customers will want to use Windows 2008 as their favorite IIS7 platform, I had to use Vista because I use VMWare Server v1.x which supports Vista not Windows 2008.

Revenge of the Basics

Install the .Net 3.5 Framework.

Add the Internet Information Services Windows Feature To Vista. In Windows 2008 this process is very similar in cases you will need to make sure the .NET Extensibility, ASP.NET, ISAPI Extensions, and ISAPI Filters features are added.

• Open the Control Panel and type “Feature” in the search window. Look for something like “Turn Windows Features On or Off”
• Make sure the appropriate Application Development Features are enabled.

Copy web application files to a directory on your web server.

Create a Web Application pointing to this directory.

Dovetail Mobile Centric Configuration

For Dovetail applications like Dovetail Mobile Agent that use the Dovetail SDK we recommend that you give the web application a dedicated Application Pool.

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The Application Pool should be configured to use the .NET 2.0 Framework in Integrated pipeline mode.

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You will also need to edit the web application configuration file named web.config :

• To contain the desired database connection information.
• The URL to the Dovetail Seeker search web service.

Test out your Web Application

Just making sure everything works...

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