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Asked: 2026-05-14T06:21:44+00:00

I have developed an ASP.NET MVC 2 website, and now need to deploy it

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I have developed an ASP.NET MVC 2 website, and now need to deploy it to my web server. I’ve overcome some hurdles already, since ASP.NET was not installed etc. but I’ve now got to the point where I can serve up plain content files, and if I try to hit one of my MVC URLs I get this:

Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Web.Mvc, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Not surprising, that, as I’ve not installed MVC2. Problem is, I can’t find any good information about how to install it!

The Microsoft Download Center lists 3 files, none of which look promising:

ASP.NET-MVC-2-RTM-Release-Notes.doc

AspNetMVC2_VS2008.exe

mvc2-ms-pl.zip

The site doesn’t bother to explain what the files actually are, but I assume that the last file is the source code. That’s what it looks like, anyway. The release notes are no help whatsoever, since they’re all about installing on your development machine, and indeed the name of the EXE makes it clear that that’s all about Visual Studio integration too.

So how do I actually deploy the darn thing?

The other option linked to from Scott Gu’s blog is the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Now, I don’t want to install more than just MVC2, and I already have IIS etc. set up, so this seems a bit heavy. But it’s all academic, as it refuses to run on my server, saying “your system is not supported” or words to that effect. (The server is Windows Server 2008 Standard SP2, so I really don’t know what it’s problem is).

Help!

[It’s ridiculous that this should be so hard – or perhaps not hard at all, but certainly a well-kept secret!]

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To deploy an MVC application, you just need to ensure that you set the references up to copy to your bin folder. Specifically, these DLLs will need to be in there…

    System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll
System.Web.Abstractions.dll
System.Web.Mvc.dll
System.Web.Routing.dll

    Note: Copying a reference to your bin folder.

    In practice, you do this by following these steps:

    1. Right-click on the reference in
      the “references” section of your
      project
    2. Select “Properties”
    3. Locate the “Copy Local” property and
      set it to “true”

    PLEASE NOTE!

    System.Web.Abstractions.dll
System.Web.Routing.dll

    You only need these two if .NET 3.5 SP1 has not been installed – if you don’t have SP1, you will need to include these two dlls, which are part of SP1 and are needed by MVC for routing.

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