What happens when a cshtml page changes on IIS? - asp.net

To be more specific, when a cshtml is needed, what happens? I would need to build an application with only ashx and a template engine, without the MVC stuffs, simple rendering, but i would'not like to loose the capability to change the cshtml files on the fly. So I have somehow to manage their recompilation, possibly without recycling the application server loading and unloading AppDomains.
On the first request I can build the page and load it in a sort of cache (like RazorEngine on codeplex), then reuse it. When the page changes i should change the page and that's it.
But as far as I understood a new assembly is built for every page, so if there are frequent changes (that is likely to happens in my environment) tons of assemblies will get loaded.
The question is,
How it works for the standard MVC ?
CodeDom is used, or directly IL that is subsequently added without creating new assemblies?
One thing that comes me in mind now is that after building the assembly, it can be decompiled and then the IL loaded directly on the app, that would make sense
Ask for further clarification if it's unclear! (and any suggestion to this Stackoverflow newbie is welcome)

Ok,
First the cshtml files are loaded then the files are compild into their own assemblies with the standard CSharp/VbCodeCompiler, no code dom is present as far as i understood...

Related

MVC conversion project, fully qualified classes are not available unless 'Global' is added or System... is removed

My question is similar to here: ASP.NET System.Anything is not defined
I am in the process of converting a website project to an MVC 4 project. To do this, I created a new MVC project and imported all of my content from the previous website. Both projects are in VB, and I'm using Visual Studio 2010 SP1, with both the MVC 4 update and TFS 2012 update applied.
I now have errors popping up when I build the MVC project. Things like "Type 'System.Web.UI.Webcontrol' is not defined." When I hover over the error, two of the prompts I get to fix it are
1) Change 'System.Web.UI.WebControl' to 'Global.System.Web.UI.WebControl'
2) Change 'System.Web.UI.WebControl' to 'WebControl'
Both of these seem to fix it, but does anyone know why I can't use "System.Web.UI.WebControl" to refer to this class? I'd rather not change all of my code... there are 100s of thousands lines in there.
Update: Outside of the System and System.Web.UI namespaces, I can also drop the 'System.'. So 'System.Drawing.Color' would become 'Drawing.Color'.
There exists another namespace containing System in your solution somewhere (e.g. Abc.System.def) - probably in a referenced library. After the conversion, the project file probably imported the prefix to System in said namespace (e.g. Abc), so when you type in System, it resolves to Abc.System.
I posted this question before I had whittled down as much of the compile errors as possible.
It appears that after I had removed all the System. references from the previous App_Code classes, the real errors started appearing. There were all sorts of messages about aspx controls not existing.
Ultimately, it seemed that I needed to right-click on the .aspx pages from my website project and choose 'Convert to Web Application.' This generated a .aspx.designer.vb file with the asp.net control declarations in yet another partial class.
After doing that for all pages, I am now able to use System. throughout the app.
To others who've asked, this System. error was only affecting the non-page code. .aspx, .aspx.vb, .ascx, .ascx.vb, .ashx, etc., files were not affected.
This does make some sense, anyhow, as I had previously pulled in all the App_Code libraries prior to pulling in the pages, and the site compiled. After importing the pages and their code behinds, the order of the errors was just odd. But I stuck with it and found the underlying cause.
Thanks for the willingness to help. If you have any other questions, I'd be glad to respond.

Creating a "web service" using ASP.net - what's in the DLL?

All,
Sorry in advance - I'm a total novice when it comes to ASP.net.
I'm working on a project that's fairly simple. I have single HTML page that collects input from the user. When the input is complete - the html page uses AJAX to post the data to a web service. That service receives the data, does some processing on it, then sends back a response.
The "client" part of this app is pure HTML/Javascript (not ASP.net), and is complete and works perfectly.
The "service" part of this app (MyHandler.ashx) is built using ASP.net. Technically - what it does is receive data from the AJAX post. It then uses Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel to open an Excel spreadsheet, pass the users' inputs into that spreadsheet, then retrieve several calculated values from the spreadsheet, and returns those values in the response to the AJAX post.
Using Visual Studio VS I've got this whole process running locally on my PC.
When I "publish" the project - VS creates a ton of files. I sent those files to the team that manages the server; they deployed them, and voilĂ  - it works. (The necessary Office interop libraries are installed on the server).
So - my question - as I make a few modest changes (e.g., validation, error handling) to the handler - MyHandler.ashx - which of those published files actually change? If i want to reploy - do I simply need to resend an updated version of MyHandler.ashx? Or, do simple coding changes to that file require changes to the DLL?
I guess my question is, generally - what's in the DLL? (E.g., is it a compiled version of MyHandler.ashx?)
More specifically - publishing my project creates the following files that I don't really understand:
Web.config
Global.asax (in my project, there's not much in here)
bin/MyProject.dll
So, if I make changes to MyHandler.ashx - can I simply reploy THAT file? Or, do I need to "publish", then "redeploy" thd dll? (By changes - I mean simple code changes, not decisions to include/exclude other external dependencies).
Sorry - this question must seem like nonsense to knowledgeable ASP.net developers. But, with other technologies I've used, things were clear:
If you're developing a Flash project, you write source code in .FLA files, then compile, then deploy the resulting .SWF files.
If you're developing an HTML/JavaScript/PHP project, you write those files, then deploy those same files
I'd trying to get a better understanding of what's what with ASP.net.
Thanks again.
The DLL contains the compiled code behind the ASHX file. The ASHX is just a service definition for an HTTP handler. When you make changes to the service (e.g. the code), simply issue another Publish like you did before and send the entire package.
But in short, when you change the code, the DLL is what's changing.

issue with .net assembly

I have created some class A.cs whose function is to be used in B.cs then B.cs is called in ASP.net webforms in codebehind. My files A.cs and B.cs is kept in App_Code folder.
The issue is if i call the function of B.cs in asp.net webform codebehind i get error that function is not defind are you missing an assembly? After researching on SO, i found to make class build action to compile. Though it solved the issue, but when i build the app i got error that my assembly is present in root as app_code and assembly.dll both
Then i reverted the process, and got same function not found issue.
I am seriously unable to figure out,How to solve this???
I run into this exact problem before. The way I fixed it is moving all the code files form App_Code folder to a Classes folder (or any folder of your choice) and then compile and fix the compiling errors. After, the error went away.
It sounds like you may have defined the Gal.DB.Service class in both the ASP.NET web app (under App_Code) and in an assembly that the web app references (i.e. Gal.DB.Manager.DLL).
The class can only be defined once.
try clearing the temporary asp.net files, depending on what web server you are using, you'll want to stop, reset or kill it to release the files before deleting them.
It sounds like this is a web app, where asp.net makes its best guess about what needs to be compiled. If this compilation model causes too much trouble, web project might be easier in the long run.

Compiling/Embedding ASCX templated UserControls for reuse in multiple web applications

I'm onto a real head scratcher here ... and it appears to be one of the more frustrating topics of ASP.NET.
I've got an assembly that implements a-lot of custom Linq stuff, which at it's core has zero web functionality. I have an additional assembly that extends this assembly with web specific behaviour.
The web specific behaviour comes with a couple of user controls marked up inside ASCX templated UserControls.
I'm having trouble putting a nice finish on this assembly so that it is simple to redeploy for use in other applications. Let me run through what I've tried so far:
Copied the ASCX files to the consuming web application using build events; far from ideal and quite a deployment nightmare.
Implemented a custom VirtualPathProvider and embedded the ASCX templates within the assembly as embedded resources. Unfortunately when using the Register directive in the consuming application it creates the designer declaration as a UserControl, where I would require a declaration of the actual control type; unforeseen (typically) and undesirable.
Created a Web Deployment Project to compile the UserControls, but the compiled user controls then become part of another assembly, and no longer descend from the class definitions in my web assembly--the assembly needs to instantiate them dependent on the request context.
So number 1 is just crap, number 2 doesn't give me the type support I desire and number 3 I think I'm about to produce a reasonable solution with:
Lump all non-control classes into the App_Code folder, prepare a factory class that will construct an object of the desired control type using reflection and the expectation that the type being reflected will be present in the deployment output (hopefully guaranteed by the presence of the ClassName attribute in the Control directive).
Theres also always the other option of rewriting the ASCX controls into custom controls, but just don't have the resources to consider it at the moment, and we've got no expertise in doing that, and they work fine as UserControls.
Am I missing something obvious, something maybe much simpler, or is this just purposefully difficult? I've read stories of the ASP.NET compilation process being very unfortunate in it's design on my travels across this topic.
Well I think I've done it ... by being mindful of a few of a few annoying pitfalls with my last approach, I recommend the following when compiling ASCX user controls in a Web Application Project using a Web Deployment Project:
Avoid putting classes in App_Code unless they're standalone or helper classes, ASP.NET treats this as a speshul folder, the meaning of which is lost on me, mayhem, confusion and chaos follows. Code in this folder does get output in the Web Deployment Project, though.
Pay close attention to your assembly names, their root namespaces and deployment output assembly name- you'll get access is denied errors if you have any naming conflicts during the aspnet_merge process.
Ultimately you'll most likely end up deploying 2 assemblies, I tried to create only one but the deployment output was still pointing to type definitions in the source assembly. This isn't a problem if you don't have any other types in your Web Application Project--I have so it was a problem for me. In my case, my final output was:
<Organisation>.<TechnologyName>.Web.DLL - Compiled Web Application Assembly (containing the ASCX templates)
<Organisation>.<TechnologyName>.Web.UI.DLL - ASP.NET Compiled UserControl assembly, created by Web Deployment Project
Clean often, and check that the Web Application Project's bin and obj paths are cleared of any previous junk built when you perhaps hadn't finalised your namespace or assembly naming scheme--the Web Deployment Project will be quite keen to include these, causing a fine mess.
Check your imported namespaces, the ASP.NET compiler likes to refer to the Import directive in the ASCX template, and it also considers imported namespaces present in web.config's <configuration><system.web><pages><namespaces> element, tweak if you get unknown definitions appearing during the deployment process.
Have some patience spare, it's quite tricky! But you do get some nice re distributable UserControls at the end of it!
Phew!

ASP.Net resource files

I'm using selenium to run some functional tests on the UI for our current application.
I want to ensure that strings from the resource files in the Web project are being displayed at the correct time and place.
Simple (I thought) all I have to do is reference the assembly of the web application and assert that the text selenium is reading from the UI matches the test in the approriate resource file.
The problem is the ASP.Net does some precomilation processing on the resource files and compiles them into an assembly called App_GlobalResources, which isn't created by the normal build process so the functional tests fail because that can't find the App_GlobalResources assembly to look the string up from.
So, any suggestions? Do I need to abandon the App_GlobalResources approach and do something manual that I have control over?
Do you understand the problem or do I need to provide more info?
My interim solution is to use SVN:Externals to pull a copy of the resx files into the test project.
I can then access them via
ResourceManager resource = new System.Resources.ResourceManager("My.Web.Namespace.resources.ImageUrls", Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
Its ugly because I already have a reference to the webproject (which I can probably remove now...) and I don't like mixing source files between projects. It just feels like asking for trouble but until someone suggests something better this will have to do.
Have you considered moving your GlobalResources into a separate assembly and then referencing that from both your web project and your test project? This is quite easy to do in VS 2008, and achievable but a little more difficult in VS 2005.
I was able to solve a similar problem using that approach.

Resources