A few quick ASP.NET MVC 3 Installation Notes

On Tuesday I blogged 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.

Update: Drew Miller from the ASP.NET team has a good blog post here that covers how to uninstall all the pieces of ASP.NET MVC 3 RC.

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.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

25 Comments

  • I've also noticed issues since updating to the RC with T4 editors like Visual T4 (beta) and tangible T4 Editor. They cause some T4 templates (like T4MVC) to throw compile errors. Part of it seems to be that the T4 files keep getting changed to "Compile" and that's not right. I still haven't tracked down exactly what's going on, but a workaround for now is to disable any T4 editors you have.

    Also if you have MVC3 projects created pre-RC, you will need to make config file changes and add some references. No where have I seen this mentioned. The easiest way I have found to do this is to create a new MVC3 project then compare and update your existing project. Note the change in the way _Layout files are specified in particular. Hopefully someone from MS who knows all the changes can give us a quick blurb of what to look for and update.

  • can you be a bit more explicit on removing packages?
    is it just Delete the packages folder?

  • Cool, when will both start working together? Do we need to wait for sp1 or will it be sooner! Either way is fine as I will always choose mvc over async anyway ;)

  • Also, will we be able to return multiple views in one action return (in one go) in mvc3 final or will this be pushed to mvc4? Thanks

  • Scott,

    I had to remove previous installation of NuPack completelly in order to be able to install ASP.NET MVC RC. I had no mvc3 betas installed but NuPack alone and it was the problem that prevented installation package to proceed with vs10-kb2385361-x86.exe update.

    hope this would same someone some time...

  • Hi Scott,
    Does this work with VS2008 professional?

    Regards,
    Deepak Chawla

  • I'm getting a file is corrupt error on running the installer. File won't extract properly either. I've removed nupak and it doesn't matter and no betas are installed.

  • The intellisense on Package Manager console is not working for me. Any ideas?

  • @Jason,

    >>>>>> I've also noticed issues since updating to the RC with T4 editors like Visual T4 (beta) and tangible T4 Editor. They cause some T4 templates (like T4MVC) to throw compile errors. Part of it seems to be that the T4 files keep getting changed to "Compile" and that's not right. I still haven't tracked down exactly what's going on, but a workaround for now is to disable any T4 editors you have.

    Can you send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) about this? I can then connect you with someone on the team to help investigate this more.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • @Alexander,

    >>>>>> can you be a bit more explicit on removing packages? is it just Delete the packages folder?

    I believe that is all that is required. Let me know if you run into issues and I can connect you with someone to help more.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • @Erx,

    >>>>>>> Cool, when will both start working together? Do we need to wait for sp1 or will it be sooner! Either way is fine as I will always choose mvc over async anyway ;)

    Right now the issue is that they both install VS QFE patches - and the patches conflict since once is not a super-set of the other. At some point this will be fixed - not sure entirely when but probably SP1 at the latest.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • @Erx,

    >>>>>>> Also, will we be able to return multiple views in one action return (in one go) in mvc3 final or will this be pushed to mvc4?

    This won't be a built-in feature of MVC3 - but we are looking to enable this in the MVC3 Futures assembly. It will be easy to enable this using NuGet (just run one command to add it to your project).

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • @Rouslan

    >>>>>> I had to remove previous installation of NuPack completelly in order to be able to install ASP.NET MVC RC. I had no mvc3 betas installed but NuPack alone and it was the problem that prevented installation package to proceed with vs10-kb2385361-x86.exe update.

    Sorry you had to uninstall this manually. The setup should have overwritten it - but I suspect what might have happened was that you had an interim build of NuPack installed and for some reason setup had troubles with it. Glad you got it working in the end!

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • @Deepak Chawla

    >>>>>>> Does this work with VS2008 professional?

    No - ASP.NET MVC 3 requires VS 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

    Sorry!

    Scott

  • @James,

    >>>>>>> I'm getting a file is corrupt error on running the installer. File won't extract properly either. I've removed nupak and it doesn't matter and no betas are installed.

    I've seen a few reports of people having download problems when using the IE9 beta. Are you by chance using that? If so, can you try downloading it again with a different browser to see if it works? I know lots of people have been able to successfully download it - so I don't think the issue is on the server side. Let me know if it still doesn't work, though, and we can help.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • @Raza,

    >>>>>>> The intellisense on Package Manager console is not working for me. Any ideas?

    It should work. Send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) and I can connect you with someone to help.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • @Shea,

    >>>>>>>> I'm trying to use the new Razor view engine with VB.NET and I noticed a few quirks. It seems like it doesn't recognize the HTML tags and jump out of "code" mode inside the VBHTML files. I can get around it by including the "@;" identifier, but it looks messy. Just wondering if this is intentional or if this is a bug. I posted a question about it at Stackoverflow: stackoverflow.com/.../razor-view-engine-quirks-in-vb-net

    I noticed that Eilon (who is the dev lead of ASP.NET MVC) answered the SO thread. He is probably the best person to work through that issue with you.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Very useful even Scott. Thanks again!

  • I was also getting a "File is corrupt" error. I tried downloading multiple times both in IE 8 and Firefox. I'm on Win 7 64 bit. I finally got it working by downloading on another machine and copying it to my dev machine. The other machine is also Win 7 64 bit so I'm not sure what the problem is.

  • I just finish upgrading my asp.net mvc 2 project. It took me 2 days. Almost no issues. (<%: is @, but <%= has no equivalent yet)

  • Hi Scott,

    Ever since upgrading to ASP.NET MVC 3 RC I have continually had WebDev.WebServer has stopped working error messages usually every fifth build or so, or when stopping the app.

    Any ideas on what could be the cause of this? Tends to run okay when deployed live so far on IIS though.

    Graham

  • @Graham

    >>>>>>> Ever since upgrading to ASP.NET MVC 3 RC I have continually had WebDev.WebServer has stopped working error messages usually every fifth build or so, or when stopping the app. Any ideas on what could be the cause of this? Tends to run okay when deployed live so far on IIS though.

    Can you send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) with more details on this? I haven't heard of this issue before and we'd love to investigate.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • All,

    If you have problems installing MVC3RC even if you have uninstalled MVC3Beta, you can try this:

    Removed the trailing slash from the following Registry key temporarily:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30319.0\Path

    C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\

    ...becomes...

    C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319

    ...run AspNetMVC3Setup. :)

    HTH!

  • Hi Scott,

    I'm getting this error the the Release Candidate:

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3921678/asp-net-mvc-3-beta-1-block-access-to-razor-views

    There are some other users there, reporting this with the RC too.

    Any ideas appreciated.

  • @MattEvans,

    >>>>>> I'm getting this error the the Release Candidate: stackoverflow.com/.../asp-net-mvc-3-beta-1-block-access-to-razor-views There are some other users there, reporting this with the RC too.

    Can you send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) about this? I can then connect you with someone on the team who can help investigate further.

    Thanks,

    Scott

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