MVC3 on Soft Sys Hosting

I am trying to get an MVC 3 web application running on a Web Server. Soft Sys Hosting claims support of MVC 3 and .Net 4.0 and since this is what I am using, I thought I would give it a shot.

Setting up Soft Sys Hosting

I started by logging in and ordering a package including domain name N1-Web.com. That was easy. What was much more complicated than it had to be was setting up all the logins. I don’t know why there were so many. I set all the passwords to be the same. See Password Safe

Host Name	User Name	Description
https://www.n1-web.com:8443 https://173.248.177.6:8443	nwebcom	This is the login to Parallels control panel for ONE machine account.
http://domaincp.softsyshosting.com/customer	wc@wc1.us	This is the login for the master account
ftp://www.n1-web.com	Nwebcom	This is the default FTP account. It is read only.
ftp://www.n1-web.com	Warren	I had to set this up to get an FTP account that would allow me to write

With this, I was able to upload HelloWorld.html to /httpdocs and display it using: http://www.n1-web.com/HelloWorld.html.

Uploading Files

I am starting by copying the following to /httpdocs:

• Bin directory (including EntityFramework.dll which I hope is not necessary)
• Content directory
• Images directory
• Scripts
• ASPX files
• N1_Logo.gif
• Global.asax
• Web.config

I also renamed index.html to index.html_old.html

 

Trying to run the web site

When I tried to run the web site, the system told me I had errors but would not tell me what they are. I added <customErrors mode="Off"/> to the <system.web> section of Web.Config.

Then when I ran it again, it tells me:

So, I contacted them and they did something that caused me to get a different error message:

I was able to make this go away by getting rid of the line: <customErrors mode="Off"/> in Config.sys that I had added above. This gave me a bit of success; I was able to get the default page of my application, then go to the users page and then try to do a filtered search. The attempt to go to the database failed and of course since I could no longer see my errors, I did not get an error message.

So, I surrounded the code in N1_UserController with a try/catch block with catch doing a Response.Write(U_Log.ToHtmlText(ex));.

This showed me the error which was that it could not find MySql.Data. I tried copying MySql.Data.dll from: to the bin directory on the web site.

That worked! Horray! I am up and running.