I bought the Windows Developer hosting package from fasthosts.co.uk, which I believe is a bog standard shared hosting package. It has ASP.NET 3.5 and, according to their support, also has SP1 installed.
I have developed my web app using ASP MVC 2 preview 1 (which by the way is awesome and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into preview 2) and it works fine on my dev machine, on which I have preview 2 installed via the installer package.
As the server doesn’t have MVC installed, I followed
Phil Haacks bin deployment method which doesn’t seam to have worked as the following happens…
When I deploy it and copy the files over to the server I get a plain useless “Server Error 500 – Internal server error”. So I modified my web config so that customErrors mode=”Off” which made no difference so I figured something is happening that is stopping it from even getting to the customErrors bit.
I then proceeded to take out bits of the web config until it gave me a decent error message. I found that it would only give me an error message if the following bits were taken out the config –
- The entire configSections section
- The entire httpHandlers section
- The entire system.codedom section
- The handlers and defaultDocument sections of the system.webServer section
I’m using the standard web config that MVC generates with no changes except my own connection string – which I took out for this testing.
Now that I got it to give me an error message, I get the “Could not load file or assembly System.Web.Mvc…” message and I’m stuck! – any suggestions?
Edit:
I bought a new hosting package with someone else and it all worked fine! I was certain it was Fasthosts fault when I deployed an empty MVC app, thanks to Phils suggestion, and then an empty normal web forms app – and they both gave the same errors.
I’m currently in the process of trying to convince them it’s their fault, but they keep reassuring me that the problem is with my web config. Tried cancelling my hosting with them but I’m apparently in a 12 month contract even though I opted to pay monthly – oh well.
I guess don’t go with Fasthosts would be the one thing to take away from this.
It sounds like it’s possible you’re not deploying to a webroot. Is that the case? Try deploying an empty MVC project.