how to begin... what is needed to get a razor file working?

[jhardman]

I was an ASP (vbscript) guru years ago then got out of programming and only kept up on SQL.  I now have a project that requires a significant amount of asp.net dev (i finished the SQL work and was asked to do a UI for the data I set up) and I am at a loss about how to start.  My webhost can handle classic ASP and asp.net and I do my programming in notepad++ and generally stick to SPA model because I can almost always accomplish anything I want in SPA.

Most pressing issue: I wanted to try a razor program, followed the w3schools razor tutorial but keep getting "this type of page is not served... explicitly forbidden".  I bet if i followed a visual studio tutorial I could eventually figure out how to get VS to put everything where it needs to go, but I'm not going to make a career of this at this point.  google seems to suggest there should be some assembly references I can add to web.config, but every answered question I find in forums seem to end with "resolved: I added the right NuGet package and now it works".  Learning to use VS is overkill for what I'm trying to accomplish.  Do any of you know what I can do to get a cshtml or even a vbhtml file to run without first figuring out VS?

And in a more general sense, if there are any people out there who have been with the industry since the notepad days and are still in the industry, what can I do to bridge that knowledge gap? So far I love seeing answers on dotnetpearls or w3schools because they explain how to program instead of how to use VS.

[justsomeguy]

The error sounds like an issue with your web server, it sounds like it's not configured correctly to run whatever you're trying to run.