ASP.NET MVC RC on Mosso

Today, I setup my first production ASP.NET MVC website. After a little investigation and a contact to Mosso’s tech support everything went up as planned. The first step is to configure your application like you would for any IIS7 host. You don’t need to have the “mvc” extension after your controllers in your routes. Next upload the application to your Mosso website. When you upload your site make sure you include the ASP.NET MVC dll files in your website’s bin directory. The needed files are System.Web.Abstractions.dll, System.Web.Mvc.dll, and System.Web.Routing.dll. These files will be located in Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC RC\Assemblies on your computer. At this point your default route should be working. The last thing to take care of is resolving the 404 error you will receive when accessing urls within the site.

The reason for the error is that Mosso runs all IIS7 applications in classic mode by default. You will need to contact Mosso tech support and ask them to switch your application to integrated mode. It will take about 15 minutes for the changes to propagate to all of Mosso’s servers. After the propagation is complete your ASP.NET MVC site should be up and running.

This process should work on any shared host or cloud host as long as they are running Windows Server 2008 and allow you to run your application in integrated mode.

Robots.txt HttpHandler in IIS7

In a ongoing effort to automate more of my work I decided to build a HttpHandler for IIS that automatically creates my robots.txt files. This particular handler will create robots.txt files that block all search robots. This handler will be installed on our projects web server which is used for development purposes only, and as such we don’t want these pages being listed in search engines.

First, we create a class project in visual studio. Next, add a reference to System.Web. Then create one class titled RobotsHandler.cs and add the following code.

Next, we need to strongly sign the assembly. This is required because we are going to add this assembly to the GAC on our web server. See this link for instructions if you are not familiar with this concept. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xwb8f617.aspx

Now that our little class library is completed we need to build. Remember to change the compilation to Release. Now, copy the assembly to the web server and register it in the GAC. See this link for more details on using gacutil. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex0ss12c(VS.80).aspx

After the assembly has been registered, we will register the handler in IIS7. See this link for instructions on how register a custom handler. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753249.aspx. Remember to set the path of the handler to "robots.txt". This will intercept all requests to robots.txt and map them to your new handler.

Now, test to make sure everything worked correctly using your web browser. Go to http://www.mysite.com/robots.txt. You should see this text:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

You could definitely expand this to use custom rules from a database or configuration file. You could also set the file to allow all robots by changing "Disallow: /" to "Disallow:".