Using MVC project with existing Web Forms project

Question

I'm looking to roll some new functionality into an existing web forms website hosted in IIS, and was thinking of using MVC. I know you can do this in a fairly straight forward manner if you are just enabling MVC inside an existing web forms project. However, I would like to be able to separate the old code from the new by putting it in a new project. The old project is a bit of a mess and not organized well, so the further I can get from it the better.

However, I don't believe this is possible (or more correctly, is a bad idea in my case), for the following reasons:

• The user is authenticated on the web forms site, so then I would have to put together some form of passing credentials to the new MVC site, and vice versa
• I wouldn't be able to share global things like Session between the two
• I would have to coordinate session times so that I didn't have the primary site time out if it hadn't been referenced in the set time
• I would need a completely different root URL (though I could use the same domain) for the MVC based sites.

My main question is this - am I missing some obvious way to make them play nicely together as one cohesive unit, or am I right in assuming that if I spin it out to a separate web application project then they are essentially two different apps? If not, is there some other way I can bind the two together to appear, more or less, as one without actually combining the projects?

Answer 1

• You could share user authentication if you a cookie to keep the user identifier. Then use the same library in both systems to decode the cookie, etc, etc.
• Sharing session objects would be a much much more difficult thing to achieve.
• Yes, that can happen.
• You can set a different root URL for every system. (You can also set the default route on the MVC project to act as a proxy and fetch the webpage from the webforms webpage, but that is a bit more complicated to achieve).

In general, it sounds like you are going to spend a lot of time and a lot of headaches.