Question

I use a shared hosting provider that doesn’t have asp.net mvc3 installed. When deploying my applications, I always end up doing a a bin deploy for the required dll’s:

Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure
System.Web.Helpers
System.Web.Mvc
System.Web.Razor
System.Web.WebPages
System.Web.WebPages.Deployment
System.Web.WebPages.Razor

My question is– can I place these dll’s somewhere in my shared hosting space, and have my deployed apps look for them there? This way I could avoid finding them and ftp’ing them everytime I deploy a new MVC3 App?

Just to add a little more description. My shared provider let’s me set up applications within my root directory. So what I was thinking was having the following structure:

root/bin/(dll’s above would be here)

root/MyApp – would need some way of finding the dll’s in the bin under the root. This might fall under the category of binding hints?

Answer 1

You can use ILMerge to combine them into a single DLL.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mbarnett/ILMerge.aspx

On that page they also reference loading DLLs from resources, which I’ve never actually tried.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/02/03/jeffrey-richter-excerpt-2-from-clr-via-c-third-edition.aspx

Other than this, you’re going to need the dll for every site if each site is a shared space.

EDIT

Try this:

AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += (sender, args) => {

      String pathname = "Your path/" + new AssemblyName(args.Name).Name + ".dll";
      var assemblyData = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(pathname);
      return Assembly.Load(assemblyData);
   }

};