I am attempting to deploy an ASP.NET MVC 3 application to a Windows 2008 x64 server (running IIS 7.0 obviously), and IIS does not want to seem to serve up the content properly. All requests are resulting in a 404.0 error, because the requests are not matching any handler and IIS is attempting to use the StaticFile handler to serve up the requests. The issue seems to be related to .NET 4.0, as I have an MVC 2 application running just fine in an app pool that is configured for the .NET 2.0 runtime.
I have had no issues deploying this same application to IIS 7.5 servers both on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Prior to deployment, the 2008 server did not have .NET 4.0 or ASP.NET MVC 3 installed, so here are the steps I undertook prior to deploying the application:
- Installed .NET 4.0
- Ran aspnet_regiis.exe (from the Framework64/v4.0.30319 folder)
- Installed ASP.NET MVC 3 using the web platform installer
- Applied MS update KB980368 to enable certain IIS 7.0 or IIS 7.5 handlers to handle requests whose URLs do not end with a period
Requests to static resources in the application (JavaScript files, images, etc) go through without a hitch, but any request to an MVC action fails with a 404.0 error. I have noticed that IIS is using the StaticFile handler to handle these requests, which is obviously incorrect. The ASP.NET 4.0 handlers (i.e. ExtensionlessUrl-ISAPI-4.0* handlers) are properly defined as far as I can tell, so I have no idea why/how the request would not be handled by one of these handlers and would fall all the way down to the StaticFile handler.
I also came across the following MS knowledge base article which mentions that you should ensure HTTP Redirection and Static Content Compression are enabled/installed on the server where you are experiencing the 404 errors. I checked, and both features were already enabled for my server. I even tried removing and reinstalling the features to no avail.
At this point I am completely out of ideas for why this is not working properly. I have been able to replicate the issue on 2 different IIS 7.0 servers. What am I missing?
The issue ended up being that my code was completely relying on the auto-start functionality that is available only in IIS 7.5. I was able to discover the issue with the help of the Failed Request Tracing feature in IIS, and I have now modified my global.asax.cs file so that the application will be properly initialized, regardless of how/when it is loaded.