Question

I am trying to get an MVC3 application working on a Windows Server 2008 R2 box. The server is running IIS 7.5. The application is setup with anonymous authentication and a v4.0 framework application pool. I have given IUSR and IIS_IUSRS access to the directory until I switch to using a service account.

I have tried the following:

1. Registered ASP.NET 4 with IIS (%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -ir)
2. I have installed MVC3 on the server from http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc3.

I am still receiving an HTTP 403.14 response: “HTTP Error 403.14 – Forbidden
The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory.”

If I throw in a dummy index.html file, the page gets served. It seems to me like a module isn’t intercepting the request to point the request to the home controller.

Answer: While MartinHN’s answer did resolve the issue, it would result in a performance hit when serving static files. Thanks to his answer I started doing some searching and found that there is a IIS7 hotfix available which will allow ASP.NET 4 applications to handle extensionless URLs without running all modules for each request. The hotfix is available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980368. After installing this hotfix my application was serving content as expected, without the Web.config change.

Answer 1

Might be one of the following…

Check your web.config for the line:

<system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
            ...
</system.webServer>

And make sure that the application pool is set to the Integrated Pipiline.

You can also try to reset the Handler Mappings in IIS. Click the site –> Handler Mappings –> Revert to parent (link should be on the right sidebar).