Doron's .NET Space

Using ASP.NET MVC on IIS 5

This is a small note for people trying to play with the MVC framework, and that are currently using Windows XP. If you dislike the ASP.NET development server that comes by default with Visual Studio as much as I do, you've switched your MVC application to work against IIS already. WinXP is running IIS 5, and you'll notice that the routing will stop working for you once you make that switch.

For instance, a request for /Products/Categories, where Products is a controller and Categories is an action on the controller, will fail. The problem is that IIS never routes this request to ASP.NET. Since you are not asking for a .aspx page, there's no way for it to know that it needs to load ASP.NET at all. So you have to tell it to map all the requests to ASP.NET. You'll do it like this:

1. Right-click your application virtual directory on inetmgr.exe.
2. Properties->Virtual Directory Tab-> Configuration.
3. Add a new mapping extension. The extension should be .*, which will be mapped to the Executable C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll, or the appropriate location on your computer (you can simply copy this from the mapping for .aspx files). On the mapping uncheck "check that file exists".
4. 3 X OK and you're good to go.
5. If you want, you can apply this setting to all your web sites. In step1, click on the "Default Web Site" node instead of your own virtual directory, and in step 2 go to the "Home Directory" tab. The rest is the same.

Now you've mapped every request on the web site to ASP.NET. To check that it works you can request a non existing html file on your web-site and see that the error you get is with an ASP.NET footer.