Sitecore 9.3 Visual Studio setup help - errors on deploy

Question

I've started trying to follow the Sitecore Platform Essentials for Developer eLearning which is going fine, but when I deploy the project, the site just breaks on start with an error about no paramaterless constructor found. I believe it's because it's copying over DLLs from my solution that are different from the dlls in the installation.

Are there any detailed guides on setting up Visual Studio with a Sitecore 9.3 installation? I can't seem to find any documentation at all.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Make sure you have set the dlls in visual studio as "copy local to false" in their properties to avoid errors as given in the following official Sitecore documentation :

https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/93/sitecore-experience-manager/en/set-up-sitecore-and-visual-studio-for-development.html

Also, make sure your controller is having a parameterless constructor like below

public MyController()
{
   //stuff
}

EDIT : (Tip) If incase your site crashes - you dont have any solution/fixes and you don't have backup, you can still find the entire folders and files of a vanilla Sitecore instance inside the installation zip file (Sitecore 9.3.0 rev. 003498 (OnPrem)_single.scwdp.zip/Content/Website). You need not install a new Sitecore instance again.. :)

Specifically, set the copy local to false for System.Web.Mvc.dll besides the regular dlls such as Sitecore.Kernel, Sitecore.Mvc, Sitecore.Mvc.Analytics

Basically, if it is a dll version mismatch after deploy/publish to your webroot folder, then you would get error message such as

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Mvc'...