On Tuesday Posted about the recent release of the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build.  You can read more about it here.

This post is a quick follow-up post that discusses a few installation issues that we’ve seen people run into - and how to fix them:

ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and C#/VB Async CTP

Two weeks ago the VS languages team released an early preview of some cool language improvements to VB and C# that we are working on for asynchronous programming.  Unfortunately it isn’t possible to have both the Async CTP and the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC installed on the same machine at the same time.  You instead need to choose one or the other right now – installing both will cause problems.

If you’ve already installed the Async CTP and want to install the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC, then you need to use Add/Remove Programs and uninstall the Async CTP.  Once it is uninstalled, then you can safely install the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build on your machine without problems.

If you’ve already installed both the Async CTP and ASP.NET MVC 3 RC on the same machine, then you will likely experience issues in VS with debugging (and potentially other things) not working.  To fix this, go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall both the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build (including the VS Tools components for it) and the Async CTP. Once you’ve uninstalled both your machine will be back to a clean state and working fine.  You can then choose to install either the Async CTP or ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and it will work fine.

Razor Intellisense and Resharper

ReSharper is a popular product from JetBrains that enhances Visual Studio’s intellisense and code editing features.  If you have ReSharper installed and want to take advantage of the Razor intellisense support we added to the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build, please read this blog post from JetBrains which discusses ways to use them together today.

NuPack/NuGet Schema and Feed Updates

We’ve made some schema and feed modifications to NuGet since the original preview release of it that will prevent you from updating packages that were added with the original preview build.  When updating to the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC, you’ll need to delete your existing packages and re-add them to your project to account for this.  You can do this by deleting the packages from disk, and then run the install-package command again. 

Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build includes several additional feature refinements (in addition to bug fixes, tooling improvements, perf tunings, etc).  This blog post covers the improvementsspecific to today’s release.  Please review my previous posts to learn more about the many, many other ASP.NET MVC 3 features and improvements introduced in prior previews/betas.

 

Razor Intellisense within Visual Studio

Colorization and intellisense support for Razor-based view templates is now supported within Visual Studio and the free Visual Web Developer Express.

Intellisense works for HTML, C#, VB, JavaScript and CSS when editing within razor based view templates:

A few hours ago we released a Microsoft Security Advisory about a security vulnerability in ASP.NET.  This vulnerability exists in all versions of ASP.NET.

This vulnerability was publically disclosed late Friday at a security conference.  We recommend that all customers immediately apply a workaround (described below) to prevent attackers from using this vulnerability against your ASP.NET applications.

Last month we released a beta of the Microsoft Web Farm Framework. The Microsoft Web Farm Framework is a free product we are shipping that enables you to easily provision and mange a farm of web servers.  It enables you to automate the installation and configuration of platform components across the server farm, and enables you to automatically synchronize and deploy ASP.NET applications across them.  It also supports integration with load balancers - and enables you to automate updates across your servers so that your site/application is never down or unavailable to customers (it can automatically pull servers one-at-a-time out of the load balancer rotation, update them, and then inject them back into rotation).

The Microsoft Web Farm Framework is a 1 MB download, and can be installed on IIS 7 and above. It is available for free. You can download the first preview of this beta here:

X86      X64

Why Is the Web Farm Framework Useful?

Running a web farm requires you to provision and manage multiple servers.  Running a web farm involves (among other things):

1. Installing IIS, ASP.NET and all of the core platform components on the servers
2. Installing and configuring custom IIS modules (UrlRewite, Media Services, etc)
3. Configuring IIS Application Pools and Sites
4. Setting up SSL certificates for things like HTTPs endpoints
5. Copying and synchronizing the appropriate sites/applications/content across the various boxes
6. Coordinating the various web servers with a HTTP load balancer to distribute load

Administrators and developers managing a web farm today often perform a lot of manual steps to do the above (which is error prone and dangerous), or write a lot of custom scripts to automate it (which is time consuming and hard).  Adding new servers or making configuring or application changes can often be painful and time-consuming.

The Microsoft Web Farm Framework makes this process much easier, and enables you to manage web farms in a completely automated way. Best of all, it is really easy to setup and use.