September 18, 2013 09:14 by
ScottI write this blog post as I saw many people get this error message when deployed their MVC 3 application:
Error 1 It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.
You can find the resource error on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5161511/mvc3-strange-error-after-switching-on-compilation-of-views or forums.asp.net.
Its always a good idea to compile your Razor views. The reason being that errors within a view file are not detected until run time.
To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:
After enabling MvcBuildViews you may find that error above.
Turns out that this problem occurs when there is web project output (templated web.config or temporary publish files) in the obj folder. The ASP.NET compiler used isn't smart enough to ignore stuff in the obj folder, so it throws errors instead.
The fix was a modification to the MVC Project File as shown below:
Under the <Target Name="MvcBuildViews" AfterTargets="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'"> node, add the following :
<ItemGroup>
<ExtraWebConfigs Include="$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)\**\web.config" />
<ExtraPackageTmp Include="$([System.IO.Directory]::GetDirectories("$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)", "PackageTmp", System.IO.SearchOption.AllDirectories))" />
</ItemGroup>
<Delete Files="@(ExtraWebConfigs)" />
<RemoveDir Directories="@(ExtraPackageTmp)" />
Hope this helps!