ASP.NET MVC - Deployed on IIS6, stops loading after session start

Question

Reaching out here... I have an ASP.NET MVC app, which runs flawlessly on VS2008 dev server and IIS7. However, deploying on IIS6 yields blank pages and no error message in event logs either. Very frustrating!

I've tried the wildcard mapping techniques, extension based routing ({controller}.aspx/{action}) and every config variation I could think of.

Does anybody have any ideas for troubleshooting a problem like this? Why would IIS serve up a blank page instead of something real (like an error). Memory issues? Machine has 4Gig of RAM, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Logging in the application shows that the Global.asax file is being processed successfully up until Session_Start. After that (when routing should take over), it stops.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Answer 1

You have to set up some ISAPI mappings. Phil Haack covered it on his blog. You can find the entry here: http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/26/asp.net-mvc-on-iis-6-walkthrough.aspx

It is kind of a pain, but it is the way IIS6 handles things. I am not sure if the RC version still has this problem as I am all IIS7 today.