This white paper outlines one method of enabling ASP.NET MVC 2 within the Sharepoint Publishing framework. It is targeted at Sharepoint professionals who are involved in the development of Sharepoint Publishing Sites.

Overview

ASP.NET MVC is a great technology for developing web applications. Its adoption is now prevalent within the ASP.NET community. It allows for the rapid development of web applications. For those not familiar with ASP.NET MVC, you can find out more here http://www.ASP.NET/mvc/

Sharepoint is a great enteprise web application framework. The majority of Sharepoint features are concerned with providing intranet, enterprise solutions and business to business functionality.  One of the key features of Sharepoint is the Web Publishing infrastructure, this is a web application framework for developing public facing web sites.

The Sharepoint Publishing infrastructure uses standard ASP.NET WebForms and WebControls. If you know how to create conventional ASP.NET web applications you can lever this knowledge to development Sharepoint Publishing Sites.

I am sure Sharepoint Publishing site developers have often asked the following question

Wouldn’t it be great to use the powerful content management features of Sharepoint but employ the rapid development methodology that MVC provides?

Any solution needs to be as simple and robust as possible and should not require any customisation to the Sharepoint installation, ie amending the Sharepoint 12 hive. 

The following sections of this document  introduce one such solution for using the ASP.NET MVC 2 framework within a Sharepoint Publishing Site. In essence this solution involves changes to the web configuration files and the creation of some custom .NET code.