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Running Our Website

2:00 with James Churchill

Let’s learn how to run our website using Visual Studio so we can preview it in a browser.

Follow Along

To follow along commiting your changes to this course, you'll need to fork the aspnet-comic-book-gallery repo. Then you can clone, commit, and push your changes to your fork like this: 

git clone <your-fork>
cd aspnet-comic-book-gallery
git checkout tags/v1.5 -b running-our-website

Additional Learning

For more information about debugging, profiling, and build configurations in Visual Studio check out these articles.

Keyboard Shortcuts

  • F5 - Start debugging (i.e. build and run your website/project)
  • 0:00

    To run our website we'll click on the Play button at the top of the screen.

  • 0:04

    If you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard, like I do,

  • 0:07

    you can also press the F5 function key.

  • 0:10

    Before we do that, let's click the little down triangle on the right-hand

  • 0:14

    side of the Play button to display a list of the installed browsers.

  • 0:18

    Using this list, we can select the browser that we want to use to run our website.

  • 0:22

    Let's select Google Chrome and then click the Play button.

  • 0:26

    Visual Studio will build our website and load it into the browser that we selected.

  • 0:31

    Uh-oh, we got a resource cannot be found error.

  • 0:35

    We can also see the HTTP status code along with a detailed description of the error.

  • 0:41

    Let's switch back to Visual Studio.

  • 0:43

    Notice how our environment has changed.

  • 0:45

    The output panel has been replaced with the Autos and

  • 0:48

    Call Stack panels, both of which are used for debugging.

  • 0:52

    We also have a new panel being displayed, the Diagnostic Tools panel.

  • 0:57

    We're not going to use the Diagnostic Tools during this course.

  • 1:00

    Click the pin here in the right-hand corner to safely collapse this panel.

  • 1:04

    To stop our application, click the Stop button.

  • 1:08

    Our website has stopped running and

  • 1:10

    our environment returns back to what it was before.

  • 1:13

    So why did we get the error?

  • 1:15

    Typically, a 404 error means that you're requesting a page that doesn't exist.

  • 1:20

    If we look at our project in the Solution Explorer panel,

  • 1:24

    we don't see any HTML files or anything that looks like an HTML page.

  • 1:30

    Turns out that NVC websites don't use HTML files to represent pages.

  • 1:36

    Instead a page is represented by the combination of the controller and a view.

  • 1:42

    Since our empty project doesn't contain any controllers or views,

  • 1:46

    we don't have a default or home page which resulted in the 404 error.

  • 1:52

    Sounds like we need to add a controller and view to our website.

  • 1:55

    In the next section, we'll do exactly that.

  • 1:59

    See you then.

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