MVC4 Portable Areas?

Question

Does MVC4 remove the MVCContrib requirement to achieve portable areas? Or is that still required?

I gave it a shot w/o MVCContrib and unfortunately I'm stuck with a typical "The view 'Index' or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations." exception.

The list of searched locations includes "~/Areas/Inbox/Views/Default/Index.cshtml" which is technically correct, but it's just not finding the view.

Some explanation:

I have a main MVC4 application and a "plugin" (if you will) MVC4 app that contains an area called Inbox with a controller and view named Default. I reference this plugin app in the main app and I can hit a breakpoint in DefaultController's Index method where the View is returned - so I know the main app is engaging the plugin app and routing the requests to the proper controller and all that. When not running, if I cursor over the return View() statement in DefaultController the balloon shows the desired view, it's just not found at runtime.

Has anyone encountered this? I'm sure it's something really simple and a stupid oversight on my part, but after hours of trying, I can't find a solution. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

MvcContrib is not a part of MVC, so no. MVC4 does not include Portable Areas. MvcContrib is not like MvcFutures where it's likely that at some point the code will be rolled into the main project. This is code that is contributed by third parties.

Answer 2

For each view, edit the Properties and set the Build Action to Embedded Resource.