asp.net MVC Routing Problem

Question

Someone has asked me to look at their code to do a few little changes to the processing, but before I can get anywhere, I can't even run up the main page. It seems to be MVC, seems to have the right routes etc. It defaults to a ~/home from default.aspx and there seems to be a route in place, but I get a 404.

I've tried changing the route and it still fails. I've debugged and it seems to be setting the routes up. I've set up Phil Haack's debug utility but it still just gives me a 404.

I'm quite new to asp.net MVC, but I've done asp.net and know some MVC (CakePHP) and I'm not really working with the MVC, just some processing code. Are there any big "gotchas" I should be looking for?

Answer 1

There is a Default.ASPX page that is included in the root path by default in all ASP.NET MVC projects. It has a comment in it that says:

Please do not delete this file. It is used to ensure that ASP.NET MVC is activated by IIS when a user makes a "/" request to the server.

You might want to check and see if it is still there.

Answer 2

Are you running the app on IIS 6? If so, the problem is that IIS only invokes ASP.NET when it sees a .aspx extension in the URL. This can be fixed in a number of ways, described, for instance, here and here. I solved the problem changing IIS options to use aspnet_isapi.dll for all files (that is, *).

Answer 3

The problem was that the project was built on asp.net MVC Preview, and I already had asp.net MVC v1 installed, which seemed to create some sort of conflict.

I've removed asp.net MVC and the problem has gone away.