Required files to bin-deploy ASP.NET MVC3

I’ve been awfully busy writing a MVC3 application for a customer over the last month. Suffice it to say that there is a great deal of goodness in MVC3 that I really like. Especially the addition of some dynamic sugar to the overly strict and rigid MVC stack is a welcome change.

Anyway, when it came to bin-deploying MVC3 I was scratching my head a bit until I found Scott Hanselman’s post on what files are required. This has changed since beta so here is an updated list:

1. Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure.dll
2. System.Web.Helpers.dll
3. System.Web.Mvc.dll
4. System.Web.Razor.dll
5. System.Web.WebPages.Deployment.dll
6. System.Web.WebPages.dll
7. System.Web.WebPages.Razor.dll

All of these files can be found in the following locations and can simply be copied to the /bin folder of your deployment output.

1. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies
2. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC 3\Assemblies

Although I really like what the guys did with MVC3, this sort of deployment is pretty sub-optimal. Having that many late-bound assemblies that you just need to deploy while not having any reference to it is a problem for me. That requires me to write custom deployment scripts that copy that stuff over, and I really don’t like that.

Let’s hope they include something in Visual Studio SP1 that lets the deployment wizard copy these files for you to the output directory.