VirtualPathProvider equivalent in ASP.NET 5/MVC6?

Question

I'm looking at migration strategies for an ASP4/MVC4 application into ASP5/MVC6. Our current implementation relies on loading cshtml views as embedded resources from DLL's, and we use a VirtualPathProvider to find these cshtml files.

Unfortunately, HostingEnvironment.RegisterVirtualPathProvider seems to be gone from MVC6. The closest thing I can find is IEnvironment.WebRootFileProvider, which is an IFileProvider. So I coded up a test class to see if it would work, and unfortunately, the IFileProvider I coded up is never queried for CSHTML files. I get requests for all of the .JS, .CSS, etc files, but no .CSHTML's.

What I'm looking for here is the ability to hook into the razor engine and provide a CSHTML file loaded from an embedded resource (or really, any other source for that matter) when a view is requested. What should I be looking at here?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Alright, I figured it out by digging around in the source code. I can load views from wherever I want by overriding the File Provider on the Razor View Engine options class:

            services.AddMvc().AddRazorOptions(x => x.FileProvider = new EmbeddedFileProvider(typeof(Startup).Assembly));

Now the only problem I see is that there appears to be no way to embed resources in an ASP.NET 5 DLL via Visual Studio...