Test Deployment to IIS

Up until now I've been testing the application through visual studio's built in web app host. I thought now would be a good time to attempt a deployment to the local IIS instance. I used visual studio's publish feature to get it installed. As the project is a web application as opposed to a web site, I needed to check a box to 'Mark as IIS application on destination'. This also has the effect of adding the application to the Default App Pool.

There were a few other things that I needed to do to get the application running. Firstly I had to change the app pool to run under .NET framework 4. Secondly I had to set up IIS APPPOOL\DefaultAppPool to have read/write access to the development database for the project. I'll set up a special test database for this later.

Once I got these things set up, I could run the application, but there were some issues with some resources not being found. These fell into the following categories:

• File was set as BuildAction - None, so didn't get deployed
• Controller action not found. This was fixed by using Url.Action helper to generate the url rather than use a relative path.
• JS and CSS not being picked up. This was fixed by using Url.Content to generate the url rather than use a root based path.