Category: IIS

Deploy your first ASP.Net MVC App to AppHarbor

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin .Net, Amazon, AWS, C#, Database, IIS, Microsoft, MS SQL Server, OpenShift, Technology, Web, Web Development, WindowsLeave a Comment on Deploy your first ASP.Net MVC App to AppHarbor

If you’ve been developing ASP.Net MVC apps lately you might be thinking of some online or cloud-based app hosting platform available as PaaS for Microsoft technologies especially for hosting ASP.Net MVC apps just like OpenShift, Heroku and other platforms are available for technologies like Ruby, Python, PHP, Node.js and even supporting CMS like WordPress. The good news for ASP.Net developers is that there is a PaaS platform available that you might already know. The platform is AppHarbor. AppHarbor runs over Amazon AWS and has some nice features that I won’t go into the details of. If you are interested in knowing how AppHarbor works you can see their page here.

Regardless of whether AppHarbor provides a decent service, new developers might still face some difficulty in deploying their applications to AppHarbor. Especially, if you are developing apps based on new Visual Studio 2015 templates like MVC. There are different ways to deploy but I would follow the below approach which in my opinion is good and provide auto deployment or in other words Continuous Integration (CI).

What do you need?

We will be using the following tools and accounts.

  • Visual Studio 2015 (any edition, I used the Professional version)
  • ASP.Net MVC app created from VS2015 MVC template
  • GitHub repo for the app/project
  • Local git repo for the app with remote repo set as your GitHub app repo
  • AppHarbor app

What’s not covered?

Our focus today is the deployment of our ASP.Net MVC app to AppHarbor. Therefore, we won’t be going into the details of how the application is created or its architecture, what’s new in Visual Studio 2015, what is MVC, what is Git and GitHub, and how to connect your GitHub repo to AppHarbor etc. We will assume that you already have all the prerequisites and we will just focus on what problems can we come across during deployment and how to fix them.

Deployment Steps

  1. Initialize a Git repo and connect it with your GitHub repo.
  2. Create the AppHarbor app from your GitHub repo. Whenever we commit/push our changes to our GitHub repo AppHarbor will automatically fetch the latest push and build it. Upon successful build it will deploy the app on its server otherwise it will keep the last successful build. This makes things very easy.
  3. Create an ASP.Net MVC application using the Visual Studio 2015 MVC template.
  4. Add the packages folder to .gitignore
  5. Enable NuGet Package Restore. In VS2015 click Tools>Options and then select NuGet Package Manager and make sure both checkboxes are checked in this section.
  6. In VS2015 right click on the project and click properties, then go to the Build Events tab. In the Post-build event command line text area paste the following command.
    1. if not exist “$(WebProjectOutputDir)\bin\Roslyn” md “$(WebProjectOutputDir)\bin\Roslyn”
      start /MIN xcopy /s /y /R “$(OutDir)roslyn\*.*” “$(WebProjectOutputDir)\bin\Roslyn”
  7. Now commit and push your changes to GitHub.
  8. That’s it! AppHarbor will automatically fetch the latest version changes and build it and you can check your AppHarbor application on its URL.

What’s Next?

There are a few things that you need to take care of specially related to security. This MVC app uses SQL Server Compact which isn’t a good option for production-level apps. Secondly, your connection string or password to the database must not be committed to a public GitHub repo.

This post will just give you a smooth start without any difficulties which I faced among other people that you can see in the resources section below.

If you think this was helpful or if I have missed anything please do let me know in the comments below.

Happy coding!

Resources

  1. https://blog.appharbor.com/2012/02/06/use-nuget-package-restore-to-avoid-pushing-packages-to-appharbor
  2. https://support.appharbor.com/discussions/problems/79727-error-msb3202-when-building
  3. https://support.appharbor.com/discussions/problems/78633-cant-build-aspnet-mvc-project-generated-from-vstudio-2015-enterprise#comment_37577678

How can I test if mod_rewrite on my server is enabled and working?

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin IIS, Linux, Microsoft, PHP, Technology, Web, Web Development, WindowsLeave a Comment on How can I test if mod_rewrite on my server is enabled and working?

Note that mod_rewrite can only be used with the web server Apache. Follow the instructions below to check whether module mod_rewrite is installed and correctly configured on your server.

Create the file .htaccess and add these two lines

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^testing.php$ modrewrite.php

This tells the webserver to load modrewrite.php when testing.php is requested.

Create the file modrewrite.php with this line

<?php echo "mod_rewrite works"; ?>

Create the file testing.php with this line

<?php echo "mod_rewrite does not work"; ?>

Now use your web browser to load testing.php. If you see “mod_rewrite works” your server has a working mod_rewrite instance. If you see anything else, including an internal server error, your server is not configured correctly for mod_rewrite.

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Installing MS Web Deploy on different port

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin IIS, Microsoft, Technology, Web, Web Development, WindowsLeave a Comment on Installing MS Web Deploy on different port

Web Deployment is a tool from Microsoft to simplify migration, management, and deployment of IIS web servers, web applications, and web sites. When you install Web Matrix it is installed by default. When installed it listens on port 80. If you are using other server like Apache on your system that also listens on port 80 then you won’t be able to start Apache due to conflict in the port. The solution is either use a different port for Apache like 8080. If you want to do that then other solution is to remove the web deploy and install it from command line. Here are the steps of doing this.

1. Uninstall Web Deploy from Add/Remove programs.

2. Download Web Deploy from

v2: http://www.iis.net/download/webdeploy

v3: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27430

3. Run the command prompt in Administration mode.

4. Run the following command:

#> msiexec /I <msi filename> /passive ADDLOCAL=ALL LISTENURL=http://+:<port>/MsDeployAgentService2/

e.g #> msiexec /I WebDeploy_x86.msi /passive ADDLOCAL=ALL LISTENURL=http://+:85/MsDeployAgentService2/

Thats it. Now you can use Apache on port 80 and Web Deploy will use the different port.

How do I: check if DLL is loaded

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin IIS, Microsoft, WindowsLeave a Comment on How do I: check if DLL is loaded

A few days back I developed an ISAPI filter and when I installed it on the IIS server and tried to test it was not running. To troubleshoot I thought how would I know that DLL has been loaded by the IIS server successfully and there is no error? If you used Windows Task Manager it does not tell you which DLL has been loaded. There is a cool command line utility to check this. That is the tasklist. According to its description:

“This tool displays a list of currently running processes on either a local or remote machine.”

To check whether a DLL has been loaded or not use the following command.

> tasklist /m yourdll*

The /m switch lists all tasks currently using the given exe/dll name. It also supports wildcards. If the module name is not specified all loaded modules are displayed.

So, I used this command to check if my DLL has been loaded. It’s a really handy command to check some other stuff as well. Try to use /? to get a complete list of switches and their description.