So I’ve been kicking around the idea of re-doing my consulting business web site for a while now.  My last design sucked.  I was quite embarrassed to send anyone to the site.  I finally got the motivated after having attended atlantacodecamp and then hearing about ASP.Net MVC 1.0 finally being released this week.

Luckily, I’d already started a prototype from an earlier beta release.  I’ll blog more about writing the code later.  I’d been tinkering with lightweight Business Objects. cool mock unit tests, and SubSonic data layers to keep my mind off of doing any real work.  But the real problem was that I had a lousy looking site.  All my designer buddies were pretty busy (why is it that everybody wants a new site design in the Spring?), but I finally managed to find a nice clean CSS layout for free on the web.  With that in hand, I was fresh out of excuses.  My site was ready.  Not functionally, but at least it looks better.

ASP.Net MVC 1.0 needs the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 installed.  This sucked for me, because my web server was already low on space.  The service pack is a 220Mb download that requires at least 300 Mb free before even thinking about installing on your system drive.  I think I had maybe 100 Meg free.  But I was desperate.  So it was time to try something crazy.

So I just uninstalled .Net entirely.  Backwards.  Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs.  First, remove 3.5. Then 2.0. And then 1.1. Next, I installed 3.5 SP1.  Voila!  Since 3.5 SP1 is cumulative, it reinstalls everything again!  Finally, install MVC.

Next, I deployed my site.  Nothing to it.  Build.  Copy.

So you’d love to hear that I deployed my site and everything worked fine.  No such luck.  IIS 6 has a little problem with MVC’s routing engine. This is solved quite easily by just clicking the Configuration button of your site in IIS Manager (on the Home Directory tab). On the Mappings tab, add a wildcard application map using C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll.  Make sure you uncheck the option to verify that file exists.  Now if this were a big production server, I’d have a problem with this step.  You can read more elsewhere about it.  But my site is not a huge production site.  So I’ll let it slide for now.

Check it out  www.pm-consult.com.  Now if I could just find a writer to put some content out there.