Chapter 6. Hosting ASP.NET MVC applications
This chapter covers
- Understanding server environment requirements
- Revealing hosting options in IIS
- Configuring different environments
Running an ASP.NET MVC application in Visual Studio is as easy as hitting F5, but what about deploying the application? In a Windows-hosted environment, web applications are typically deployed to Internet Information Services (IIS). But several versions of IIS are on the market, each with different configurations and options for hosting an ASP.NET MVC application. With new features like routing in some versions of IIS, hosting presents new challenges that didn’t exist with Web Forms applications.
In this chapter you’ll learn options for hosting in the various IIS versions supported today.
In most scenarios, deploying an ASP.NET MVC application involves deploying to a modern Windows Server OS environment. Occasionally, it’s necessary to deploy to older environments, such as Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP, with older versions of IIS. Table 6.1 shows Windows OSs and the versions of IIS available.
Table 6.1. Windows and IIS versions
| Windows operating system |
IIS version |
|---|---|
| Windows XP Professional | IIS 5.1 |
| Windows XP Professional x64 Edition | IIS 6.0 |
| Windows Server 2003 | IIS 6.0 |
| Windows Vista | IIS 7.0 |
| Windows Server 2008 | IIS 7.0 |
| Windows 7 | IIS 7.5 |
| Windows Server 2008 R2 | IIS 7.5 |
For all practical purposes, we need to worry about only two types of hosting environments:
- IIS 7.0+
- IIS 6 and earlier