Error 403, 403.14, 404 - After deploying ASP.NET MVC website on IIS 7, IIS 7.5

After deploying your ASP.NET MVC website on IIS 7 or IIS 7.5, you might face following errors while browsing your website:

• 403.14 - Forbidden (The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory.)
• 404 - Not Found (The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable)

Following are the possible causes/ fixes for this -

• Make sure the Application pool targets correct version of .NET framework (i.e .NET Framework v4.0.30319 for .NET 4 and 4.5)
• Make sure the Pipeline mode of IIS Application pool is "Integrated"
• Check UrlRoutingModule-4.0 is added in the modules of that website.
• (To do that, open list of added modules by clicking "Modules" against your website, and see if the module "UrlRoutingModule-4.0" is added or not). If not, then add a module by clicking "Add Managed Module" button, where select System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule as a Module type, and give "UrlRoutingModule-4.0" as its name)
• Make sure you have following element added in system.webServer section of website's web.config

<system.webServer>

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"></modules> 

</system.webServer>

In most cases of 403.14, or 404 error, above are the possible causes and fixes. 

FIX: 'Model' conflicts with the declaration 'System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.Model'

I suddenly started receiving this error in one of my razor view. The error message was -
'Model' conflicts with the declaration 'System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage<TModel>.Model'

This error is caused if you use "Model" instead of "model" in one or more lambda expressions (predicates) in your view.

Perform a case-sensitive search for "Model =>", and its very much possible that you may notice this in one or more lambda expressions,
For example,

@Html.EditorFor(Model => Model.BirthDate)

This should be actually, @Html.EditorFor(model => model.BirthDate)

Correcting this should fix the Model conflict error for you in your view.

Accessing Model property in MVC View from Javascript

For example, you have following model in your MVC application:

public class Employee
{
public string EmployeeName
public int EmployeeNumber
}

You have bound this model to your MVC view (Razor/ Html), and there may be a case when you need to access "EmployeeName" in the Javascript from that view.

You can access value of "EmployeeName" property of your model by following way:

<script type="text/javascript">
function showEmployeeName()
{
alert('@(Model.EmployeeName)');
}

</script>

CodeProject

FIX: JQuery date format validation for non US dates in Chrome

Include following script in your javascript file and reference it in your page(s) to get rid of the most common error of JQuery date format validation in Chrome which doesn't allow non US dates.

    $(document).ready(function () {
jQuery.validator.methods["date"] = function (value, element) { return true; }
    })

My Bookmarks - Part I: CSS

Following are references to some of the sites/ posts which I came across while developing websites.

**Credit to the respective post/ blog owners **


Cross-Browser CSS Gradient
This concise CSS class can make your DIV or any other HTML control appearing with gradient background without really needing any image.

.gradientBackground
{
background: #999; /* for non-css3 browsers */
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#cccccc', endColorstr='#000000'); /* for IE */
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#ccc), to(#000)); /* for webkit browsers */
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #ccc,  #000); /* for firefox 3.6+ */
}

Complete reference to post: http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/cross-browser-css-gradient
A cool website to get color code to use them while setting gradients: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/gradient/

Replacement of InnerText property, while updating display text of elements such as (span, etc) in HTML.

This article aims to provide a javascript function to update display text of controls such as (SPAN, etc) in HTML using javascript. 

Generally, we tend to update innerText  property of such elements in this scenario, but when it works perfectly as expected in IE and Chrome, it fails in Firefox. Because,it's not supported.

Instead, include below javascript function in your JS library, and call it. This is more elegant and cross-browser solution of this problem.

function setTextContent(element, text) {
    while (element.firstChild!==null)
        element.removeChild(element.firstChild); // remove all existing content
    element.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text));
}

Sample call:

setTextContent($('span.displayText), result);

When should we not use MVC bundling?

As we all know MVC bundling and minification is a very powerful feature, but recently I faced a strange problem in one of the project as detailed below.

I was using Trent Richardson's Timepicker control to avail time picker functionality in my MVC 4 application. I had relevant JQuery file bundled using MVC bundling feature. I found this working quite well in development environment (Visual Studio 2012).
But when I deployed the website on IIS, I started facing a strange issue, and there was a javascript error "function expected" in that particular bundle. I could see the bundle got loaded because developer tool was showing javascript code when that bundle was selected in "scripts" tab.

Finally, when I referenced the JQuery file directly instead of bundle, it started working fine on IIS. Though the problem got solved, I was than now curious to know what was wrong with that particular file if bundled, and if MVC bundling was actually an issue, then why it was working well in development environment, but not in IIS?

Posting this on various forums gave me following two detailed answers which helped me in identifying in which situations we should avoid using bundling -

Answer 1

Minification is a complex process by making scripts/styles smaller using techniques such variable name shortening, white space elimination, comments removal, etc... It uses ASP.NET Web Optimization that depends on WebGrease for minification. Of course, there can have issues but I personnaly never noticed that.
Here are some situations, where you should not use bundling

• There is only one file in your bundle. Why bundling ?
• You are using only famous frameworks such as JQuery or jQuery UI. Do not redistribute scripts that are already served by someone else. Google/Microsoft/Amazon/... already provide CDN for the most popular, open-source JavaScript libraries.
  <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
• Your bundle takes only a few Bytes. Web performance Optimization suggests to limit the number of web requests. Everything has a cost. Not very optimal, but sometimes it's better to put inline scripts in your page.
• In some architectures. Bundles requests contains a unique identifier used for caching. If any file in the bundle changes, the ASP.NET optimization framework will generate a new token, guaranteeing that browser requests for the bundle will get the latest bundle. When working with some architectures, JS updates can be frequent and will invalidate all your bundles.
• On Dev Environment. It's is really really painful to debug a bundle.

Answer 2

What bundling suppose to do is to put together the script/stylesheet files in a single bundle into a single request and send it to the client so that the browser has to make less calls to get those required script files. In a development environment, when you do debugging in visual studio. It doesn't do the above process unless you specify it to do so. But in a production environment, when the debug is set to false in the web.config file. it will start to do the above process. There can be some other reasons as well. such as the script might have two versions. one for debugging and one for production. I came across such a situation with knockout. in my development environment I had referenced the debug version of the script. But when I put it into the production environment, everything came to a hault. There was a release version for the 

knockout script file and I had to reference that to make everything work again

 

 

Hope this will help you