monodevelop doesn't find xsp4 web server although it is installed/running

Question

I'm running 13.04 32bit and installed monodevelop-latest (keks9n-monodevelop-latest-raring.list repository, currently 4.1.7) and after getting my MVC4 application to build I wanted to run it (right-click on subproject and "Run Item")

But monodevelop doesn't find the xsp4 webserver. I get the following error message:

The xsp4 web server cannot be found. Please ensure that it is installed.

But mono-xsp4 is installed and runs automatically or can be run manually (sudo service mono-xsp4 start or just xsp4)

However I had some problems getting mono-xsp4 to work (I don't know if this is related to the monodevelop problem so I describe it aswell). On apt-get install mono-xsp4 I got:

Binding Mono XSP 4 address: 0.0.0.0  
 * You have an incomplete /etc/xsp4/debian.webapp  
 * To fix it, you need to install at least one package for xsp4 (like asp.net-examples)

Installing asp.net-examples simply (re-)installs mono-xsp2 and I didn't find any asp.net4-examples package.

Thus mono-xsp4 would not still run. I realized there are no applications set in /etc/xsp4/debian.webapp (empty except <apps></apps>) and by simply copying /etc/xsp2/debian.webapp to /etc/xsp4/ I could start mono-xsp4 (however, of course, there are no asp4 examples installed)

Back to monodevelop: In monodevelop I set the ip and port correctly to the ip and port mono-xsp4 is using but still xsp4 is not found. Whether mono-xsp4 is already running or I stopped it so monodevelop can start it itself, I always get the error message above.

Can somebody help me out? Is this a bug of monodevelop 4.1.7 (I need version v4 otherwise the VS2012 solution won't open correctly) or is something wrong with my mono-xsp4 install?

I would love to use the lastest monodevelop v4 stable version but I didn't find any ubuntu 13.04 repository for it.

Solution 1

I can answer my own question:

https://launchpad.net/~keks9n/+archive/monodevelop-latest

gives the answer:

If you want to debug ASP.NET applications make sure that you are using your system Mono runtime ( http://i.imgur.com/SO93KJ2.png ). XSP isn't included to /opt/ Mono installation because of compatibility issues.

thus, if I build with mono 3.2.1 and then change the runtime back to the mono runtime in /usr (v 2.10.8.1) the page gets openend and xsp4 (/usr/lib/mono/4.0/xsp4.exe) runs!

Solution 2

For me the issue was using MonoDevelop 5.X, even if I was using xsp4.exe in bin/ directory it didn't work - eventually I got blank page with endless loading. Installing Ubuntu's default 4.0.12 version made everything work perfectly.

Comments

[xameeramir]

Try installing it again

[th1rdey3]

If you have installed MonoDevelop 5.X from PPA which also install a local copy of mono then you need to run MonoDevelop itself using users mono runtime. I have written a howto here

[Daniel Kmak]

@th1rdey3 Monodevelop 5.6.1 (Build 5) works perfect for me now, but maybe this answer will help someone.