Asp.Net-MVC application dying

Question

I have a strange issue with an Asp.NET MVC application.

Using Asp.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 on IIS 7.5 - Integrated

After building the application everything runs fine. Then after some random amount of time (or sometimes after updating a view or js file) the application dies.

Meaning, requesting the root page, I get the 403 error and requesting any other page I get a 404 error.

After a rebuild everything works fine again for a little while until it dies again.

I am seeing this on two different development machines. Also, I have another application which is very similar (MVC 3, IIS etc) on both dev machines and this one runs without problem. I have inspected the config files in detail and cannot see anything of notable difference.

Does anyone know what could cause an application to die or where to look for further information? (I can still access elmah.axd though no information is there).

Answer 1

There's not much to go on here, but the 403 and 404 are clues that at least ASP.NET routing is not working; 403 is coming back because the web server thinks you want to do a directory browse, 404 because your request doesn't have a valid corresponding resource.

Since you are using the new version of MVC, I would suspect the issue may lye there. When you get the error condition, can you browse to a regular .aspx page? Does it execute server side code correctly?

You have the site hosted in IIS 7.5, not just the built in Visual Studio web server, right? Is it possible to turn on monitoring/event logging to see if IIS is taking a hit?

I apologize for not having any actual answer, sounds like you have a tough issue to debug.

Good Luck!