ASP.NET MVC VirtualPathProvider not working under IIS 6

Question

By ASP.NET MVC plugin architecture, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/340183/plug-in-architecture-for-asp-net-mvc

I have separated DLL(plugin) which contains the views, css and javascript files in the resources. So my own VirtualPathProvider will load the content out from the DLL if that is for the plugin. It works all fine during development. But It appears not working once I deployed it in IIS. (I mapped the whidcard in IIS 6 and the views are showing)

I have registered my VirtualPathProvider in global.asax as

protected void Application_Start()
{
    RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
    HostingEnvironment.RegisterVirtualPathProvider(new MyVirtualPathProvider());
}

For example. http://localhost/Plugin/MyPlugin.dll/Styles.MyStyles.css

This should be loaded from the plugin.dll but IIS returns 404.

I guess the static files are all handled by the IIS and not went through asp.net and my VirtualPathProvider ? Is there way to get around this? Please shed some light.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If this is IIS 6 you will need a wildcard mapping. See this blog post from Phil Haack.

Answer 2

I've found the workaround by adding the staticFileHandler in the web.config httpHandlers element.

<add verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="*" type="System.Web.StaticFileHandler" validate="true" />