R – Does ASP.NET MVC perform better under IIS7 versus IIS6

ASP.NET MVC does indeed work under IIS6 (and IIS5 for that matter) as long as you enable wildcard mappings to ASP.NET. I have deployed MVC applications to production using IIS6, so I can guarantree that it's possible.

The key difference is that all URLs in DynamicData end in a file with an ASPX extension so, regardless of physical existance, the ASP.NET runtime is invoked (because ASPX is associated with ASP.NET), whereas most ASP.NET MVC requests to not have an extension (or have an MVC extension, which is not mapped by default) and thus IIS configuration is required before it will work.

IIS7 works automatically because IIS7 itself is managed and thus there is no separation between IIS/ASP.NET.

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

1. Open the project file in a text editor.
2. Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
3. At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>