How can I embed an ASP.NET MVC 3 application in a WSS 3.0 site?

Question

I'm very new to SharePoint development and I'm wondering how I can embed an ASP.NET website (preferably MVC 3) into a WSS 3.0 site. I've worked with ASP.NET MVC 3 recently and I've used ASP.NET 3.5 in the past.

I plan to use SharePoint for the administrative tasks and Work Flows. I need to place aspx or mvc pages within SharePoint. These pages will allow users to perform CRUD operations on an external database. Is what I want to do possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

First, even if there were a way to embed an MVC app into sharepoint, WSS 3 is based on .NET 2.0 runtime, while MVC3 requires .NET 4 runtime. This would most likely never work.

Second, I don't believe it's possible to embed an MVC site in SharePoint, since sharepoint has a very specific set of extension methods based on WebParts, which are an ASP.NET tool. About the closest you could get was to use an iframe in a sharepoint page, but this would be to an external site with no interaction between SP and the site.

Answer 2

I wasn't able to embed an MVC app in SharePoint, but I was able to embed a .NET 4.0 ASP.NET Web App using the following tutorial:

http://www.devexpertise.com/2009/02/18/integrating-a-custom-aspnet-application-into-sharepoint-part-1/

I haven't fully tested it and confirmed that all the .NET 4.0 features work, but so far so good.