R – “View in Browser” and “Browse with…” context menu entry on classic .asp files in VS

asp-classicbrowservisual studio

some bad legancy web application projects still have classic asp files. these project consist of 95% of classic .asp files and the rest only of asp.net (.aspx).

if you right click on an .aspx file in the solution explorer of VS you can choose "view in browser" and "browse with…".

however if i right click on an classic .asp file there, there is no such option!

do you have any tip/hint/addin for me so that it will show these two context menu entries also for .asp files?

i run all my projects in IIS not the build in casini web development server VS comes with!

thanks, toebens

Best Answer

The problem is that VS includes the Cassini web server out which it can deliver execution of ASPX files. However it does not include a processor for ASP pages, for that you need to run the ASP pages in IIS, hence there is no simple "Display in browser" since VS has no idea what URL to ask the browser to display.

Related Solutions

Asp – Classic ASP Intranet and New ASP.NET Applications

One solution would be to use IIS Manager to configure the website (created for your ASP.NET app by Visual Studio) and add a virtual directory for each of the common folders so that (by the 'virtual' nature of the virtual directory) they will 'appear' to be in the same root folder as your ASP.NET app.

/root
  app_1
  app_2
  dotnetapp_1
    <virtual>img
    <virtual>js
  ...
  img
  js
  style

You can probably script IIS or edit an XML file if you need to do this in bulk, and I'm sure there must be an even more elegant way to do something similar that doesn't require to much mouse work!

Asp – Classic .ASP and .NET .aspx web pages in one ASP.NET Web app

There is no straigthforwad solution for sharing session variables between classic ASP and ASP.NET. I would recommend you to persist sessions into a database, like it is described in this Microsoft Article. This way both ASP and ASP.NET can access session variables.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Asp – Classic ASP Intranet and New ASP.NET Applications

Asp – Classic .ASP and .NET .aspx web pages in one ASP.NET Web app

Related Topic