Deploying MVC2 application to IIS7.5 - Ninject asked to provide controllers for content files

Question

I have an application that started life as an MVC (1.0) app in Visual Studio 2008 Sp1 with a bunch of Silverlight 3 projects as part of the site. Nothing fancy at all. Using Ninject for dependency injection (first version 2 beta, now the released version 2 with the MVC extensions).

With the release of .Net 4.0, VS2010, MVC2 etc., we decided to move the application to the newest platform. The conversion wizard in VS2010 apparently took care of everything, with one exception - it didn't change references to mvc1 to now point to mvc2, so I had to do that manually. Of course, this makes me think about other MVC2 things that could be missing from my app, that would be there if I did File -> New Project... But that is not the focus of this question.

When I deploy this application to the IIS 7.5 server (running on Win2008 R2 x64), the application as such works. However, images, scripts and other static content doesn't seem to exist. Of course they are there on disk on the server, but they don't show up in the client web browser.

I am fairly new to IIS, so the only trick I knew is to try to open the web page in a browser on the server, as that could give me more information. And here, finally, we meet our enemy. If I try to go directly to the URL of one of the images (http://server/Content/someimage.jpg for instance), I get the following error in the browser:

The IControllerFactory 'Ninject.Web.Mvc.NinjectControllerFactory' did not return a controller for a controller named 'Content'.

Aha. The web server tries to feed this request to MVC, who with its' default routing setup assumes Content to be a controller, and fails.

How can I get it to treat Content/ and Scripts/ (among others) as non-controllers and just pass through the static content? This of course works with Cassini on my developer machine, but as soon as I deploy, this problem hits.

I am using the last version of Ninject MVC 2 where the IoC tool should pass missing controllers to the base controller factory, but this has apparently not helped. I have also tried to add ignore routes for Content etc., but this apparently has no effect either. I am not even sure I am addressing the problem on the right level.

Does anyone know where to look to get this app going? I have full control of the web server so I can more or less do whatever I want to it, as long as it starts working.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with StructureMap and favorite.ico what I ended up doing was to add a route to ignore that path.

        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
        routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico");

Keep in mind that I have absolutely no idea really but another thing that changed is the need for Default.aspx, also if you have any custom pages those would need to mapped. That's the only two problems I had with routing.

        routes.RouteExistingFiles = false;

EDIT: I meant that the RouteExistingFiles should be false otherwise I get that exception in MVC2 :)

Answer 2

Turns out this was caused by some account settings - I was unaware of the IIS AppPool\sitename account automatically being created by IIS in Win2008 R2 server. After trying "everything", I came across this information, gave the proper rights, and stuff magically started working.

Pretty hard thing to debug, especially for someone (me) with very limited IIS experience.