ASP.NET 5 (originally vNext) support

[Daniel15]

Moved to pull request #94

[lukemcgregor]

I'm really keen to see this. I had a quick crack at getting it going but I ended up going down the rabbit hole a bit.

It will require (as far as I can tell):

• a new React.Web.Mvc6 project (using vNext .net)
• Possibly need to re-compile of the React and React.Web in .net 4.5 or vnext (required to reference them in the Mvc6 project)

The second is a little tricky as it basically means dual compilation or upgrading everything (which doesn't make sense for MVC 3 especially)

I imagine if you do the above it will probably work.

[Daniel15]

We'll need a new React.Web project but why would React itself need to be recompiled? Surely ASP.NET v5 can reference .NET Framework 4.0 assemblies?

[lukemcgregor]

I think you might be right, I had a go at making it work but couldn't work out how to tell it not to build the .net core version of the project, so there's a couple of errors still. I needed to create wraps to even get it to reference the other projects which is a bit weird also.

I did also need to change IHtmlString -> HtmlString also as the interface no longer exists in the new MVC.

Anyway when you do get to implementing this feel free to take a look at the fork.

[Daniel15]

I ordered a new external hard drive to give me enough hard drive space for another Windows VM and to install the Visual Studio 2015 preview :P

I'm going to be on holiday from 6th to 16th February but I'll probably pick this up when I return.

I did also need to change IHtmlString -> HtmlString also as the interface no longer exists in the new MVC.

Yeah I think IHtmlString is part of System.Web which is no longer used with ASP.NET 5. This can probably be handled with conditional comments in the code.

[Daniel15]

So far I've created a new React.AspNet5 ASP.NET 5 Class Library project but I can't figure out how to make it reference the core React project. Apparently referencing csproj projects from kproj projects should work in the latest version of Visual Studio so this should definitely work.

I'm trying to use IReactEnvironment but I keep getting "The type or namespace name 'IReactEnvironment' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)" no matter what I try. I tried kpm wrap src\React as suggested at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27020036/how-to-reference-csproj-from-kproj but that didn't help :(

[Daniel15]

I got past that, the next hurdle is hooking ReactJS.NET's dependency injection container (using TinyIoC) into the ASP.NET dependency injection container. I've managed to get dependencies registering as scoped (per-instance) but they're not being disposed correctly. I'll investigate more tomorrow, and post what I've done in a separate branch if I get anything useful :)

[Daniel15]

Initial set of changes in 5d48be6. With these changes I was able to run an ASP.NET MVC 6 site and use server-side rendering. I still need to add the pieces to the build script.

[Daniel15]

Moving to pull request #94