Integration options for existing MVC applications

We have many custom WebForm and MVC applications in subfolders on our current website. What is the easiest options for integration with Sitefinity? Can they run alone in their subfolder or do they have to be integrate as modules or widgets? What are the differences? What is the fastest method? We'd need the same master page and navigation on the CMS and on the applications.

Thanks,
Ross

Hi Ross,

You can really do it any number of ways. The preferred method would be to create new widgets using Sitefinity Thunder. You can build standard widgets or mvc widgets. Note that our mvc widgets supprt asp.net mvc 3 and not 4.

You can, however, build your own mvc 4 widgets, and web forms if needed. At it's core Sitefinity is just a .Net project and you can interface with the code via Visual Studio like you would any .Net project. All of our content modules are supported by native and fluent apis, so you could programmatically create your pages and integrate them with the project. It's probably easier to create controls rather than pages, cause you could still register them in the backend and drag and drop them on to your pages, but you have your aspx files as well. You just create a Sitefinity page and have it redirected to it. 

Hi David,

Are there other options aside from rebuilding our applications as widgets? We've got over 80 applications stored as separate Visual Studio projects. They are deployed to the website separately. It's not feasible for us to rewrite all 80 as Sitefinity widgets. How else can we run them in sub-folders of the site and use the same master pages?

Cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross,

Sorry, I didn't do a very good job of explaining that clearly. Yeah, without knowing more about the inner workings of your web apps and forms, I'm confident that you can use them as is with Sitefinity.

Will they be integrated with the Sitefinity project or will you have them in an external web project or dll? 

Let me know and I will send you some documentation accordingly. 

Hi David,
All our applications are separate solutions in Visual Studio. We deploy them to their own sub-folders on the web server. We do a high number of small applications and they are a mix of webforms and MVC although going forward we will be strictly using MVC. The separated projects make it easier for our team to keep them organized. Our current CMS generates static pages which are FTP'd to the web server. In that process it generates webform master pages and MVC layouts with navigation that the applications use.

Thanks,
Ross

Hi Ross,

This might be of some use. Add DotNet MVC project as virtual directory under Sitefinity Website
 
There's really not much in the way of documentation for this as the sitefinity project is just a standard asp.net/c# project, so you can add separate projects to the solution as you normally would. You can ref your assemblies from that project and use them in SF just as you normally would.  

Let me know if you have any additional questions.