Q:

One MVC Project or Two?

We have a large MVC .NET website for a hospital; it has a Doctor Portal, and a Patient Portal. In essence it is two sites, with very little feature overlap.  We outsourced the Doctor part to a Vendor and now we are creating the Patient part.  I am recommending that we create two separate MVC projects since we are creating the Patient portal from scratch and don’t want the headache of integrating within the other code. Control, Route clashes etc.  There are already 100 routes in the Global.asax for the doctor site.
The Director is somewhat technical and wants me to explain why I want to create another project. I simply don’t want the headache of having to work in other code, within the same view folder, and control folder. What are my options?  Am I jumping the gun, and should just stick to the current project. Also the doctor site is live and we are adding the patient part. Does MVC/.NET offer a workaround for this?

A:

This sounds like a good case for using MVC Areas - a feature added in MVC 2.  Check out this MSDN article for more information.
From the article itself:

... However, some applications can have a
  large number of controllers, and each
  controller can be associated with
  several views. For these types of
  applications, the default ASP.NET MVC
  project structure can become unwieldy.
To accommodate large projects, ASP.NET
  MVC lets you partition Web
  applications into smaller units that
  are referred to as areas. Areas
  provide a way to separate a large MVC
  Web application into smaller
  functional groupings. An area is
  effectively an MVC structure inside an
  application. An application could
  contain several MVC structures
  (areas).

