Is ASP.NET MVC completely (and exclusively) based on conventions?

–TL;DR

Is it better to define all routes in the Global.asax than to define separately in the areas?

I am working on a MVC 4 project that will serve as an API layer of a larger application.

.Net C# Remote Method Invocation (RMI) (Client/Server communication)

What exactly is C# version of Java RMI?

ASP.Net MVC 3: multiple versions of the site without changing of URL, is it possible?

Our website is written in ASP.NET MVC 3 and we want to change a feature in the core functionality of the site.

How should I implement the repository pattern for complex object models?

Our data model has almost 200 classes that can be separated out into about a dozen functional areas. It would have been nice to use domains, but the separation isn’t that clean and we can’t change it.

Modular enterprise architecture using MVC and Orchard CMS

I’m making a large scale MVC application using Orchard. And I’m going to be separating my logic into modules. I’m also trying to heavily decouple the application for maximum extensibility and testability.

ASP.NET MVC Portable Areas – Can they communicate and be used as a plugin-like architecture?

I’ll get straight to the point:
I was wondering if there is a common pattern to use portable areas as a components of a plugin-like architecture.

MVC or Extract Service Layer

we have an application that is built with .Net MVC. We are now tasked with exposing API’s to third parties. Members on our team want to just continue down our current path and just use more controllers so we can reuse the backend of our current application. Logic tells me we need to create a seperate service layer when more clients are going to be accessing it, but .Net MVC seems to take care of all of this. Is it really acceptable architecture to use controllers in a stand alone application to expose API’s and what would be the potential gains of extracting the service layer out?

Project/DLL separation of concerns in ASP.NET MVC

I’m coming from a web forms n-tier background into ASP.NET MVC projects, and I’m wondering what the best practices are for separation of the components of MVC into different libraries (or not to) in the way one might with an n-tier model. Most of the sample apps I have seen only had one project file and objects were separated only by folder.

Unit test: How best to provide an XML input?

I need to write a unit test which validates the serialization of two attributes of an XML(size ~ 30 KB) file.