Question

I am succesfully building ASP .Net applications in NAnt using the ASP Compiler, without a problem., as part of my Continuous Integration process.

However, if I try exactly the same process on an ASP .NET MVC application, the build fails in NAnt, but will compile succesfully in Visual Studio. The error message I get in NAnt is:

[HttpParseException]: Could not load type ‘MyNamespace.Views.Home.Index’

which appears that it has a problem with the dots in the filenames, but I might be wrong.

Any suggestions are most welcome.

Answer 1

The MVC app needs to be built as a project before using aspnet_compile. If your MVC project uses other class library projects, they also need to be compiled.

After running aspnet_compile, we then want to delete various files that should not be part of the deployed site.

This build file is located in the parent directory to my project MvcApplication.

<project default="build">
    <property name="build.dir" value="${project::get-base-directory()}"/> 
    <property name="build.config" value="Release" />

    <target name="build">

        <exec program="${framework::get-framework-directory('net-3.5')}/msbuild.exe">
            <arg value="/property:Configuration=${build.config}" />
            <arg value="${build.dir}/MvcApplication/MvcApplication.csproj" />
        </exec>

        <delete dir="${build.dir}/PrecompiledWeb" includeemptydirs="true" failonerror="false"/>

        <exec program="${framework::get-framework-directory('net-2.0')}/aspnet_compiler.exe">
            <arg value="-v" />
            <arg value="/" />
            <arg value="-p" />
            <arg value="MvcApplication/" />
            <arg value="-f" />
            <arg value="PrecompiledWeb" />
        </exec>

        <delete verbose="true" includeemptydirs="true" failonerror="false">
            <fileset basedir="${build.dir}/PrecompiledWeb">
                <include name="Controllers" />
                <include name="Properties" />
                <include name="obj/**" />
                <include name="obj" />
                <include name="*.csproj" />
                <include name="*.csproj.user" />
            </fileset>
        </delete>

    </target>
</project>