ASP.NET MVC Routing giving dir listing at root.

Question

I've got the following routes:

// Submission/*
routes.MapRoute(
    "Submission",
    "Submission/{form}",
    new { controller = "Submission", action = "Handle", form = "" });

// /<some-page>
routes.MapRoute(
    "Pages",
    "{page}",
    new { controller = "Main", action = "Page", page = "Index" });

The first routes requests exactly as per this question. The second generically routes a bunch of static content pages. For instance localhost/Help, localhost/Contact, etc. all route to the MainController which simply returns the view according to the page name:

public class MainController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Page()
    {
        var page = (string)RouteData.Values["page"];
        return View(page);
    }
}

The problem is, during testing at least, localhost/ gives a dir listing instead of routing to Main/Index.aspx. The real problem is it fubars my SiteMap menu because the URLs aren't matching what's defined in the Web.sitemap file. localhost/Index does give me the correct view, however.

The curious thing is this works as expected on Mono / XSP.

Answer 1

If you are testing it using Visual Studio Dev Server than it should work. I have tried it just now.

On IIS neither of "localhost/" and "localhost/Index" should work unless you enabled wildcard mapping

So it works for me. You probably are missing something that is not obvious from the post.

BTW, your action can be improved:

public ActionResult Page(string page)
{
    return View(page);
}

EDIT: Here is my sample project.

Answer 2

I finally figured it out. There were (potentially) two things going awry. One, the project must have the MVC project type GUID. Check out this for an idea - though the post isn't quite on topic. Two, Visual Studio 2008 requires SP1 for an updated ASP.NET development server; the version of it prior to SP1 doesn't kick off Global.asax w/o a Default.aspx page.